Trends In MIS, Part I: Pushing Surgical Boundaries

Advances in laparoscopic technologies and techniques and an increasing demand for more minimally invasive surgery (MIS) are driving growth in the MIS products market. Medical device manufacturers are developing new, more precise endomechanical and energy devices and improved camera systems that are further decreasing the invasiveness of surgery, improving access and visualization, and allowing surgeons to cut, coagulate, and seal tissue and vessels with more accuracy, stability, greater reliability, and reproducibility than ever before. Although the per procedure cost of some of these devices can be quite high, health care providers are increasingly purchasing these technologies as manufacturers demonstrate their value in terms of cost savings and improved outcomes by enabling more procedures to be safely performed via an MIS approach. From a market perspective, manufacturers are driving growth in the MIS product market by targeting underpenetrated and emerging markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, and by focusing education, sales, and product development efforts on growing clinical areas with good potential for increasing MIS adoption.

At SAGES 2012, this year’s meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, held in San Diego in March, it was apparent that researchers and innovators are pushing surgical boundaries and expanding the MIS approach into more complex surgical procedures than ever before in the areas of urology, gynecology, thoracic, hepatobiliary, pancreatic, colorectal, oncologic, head and neck, and bariatric surgery. To date, adoption of the MIS approach has increased at a slower pace for complex procedures, as surgeons don’t have the advanced laparoscopic skills to perform some of these procedures and better tools are still needed. (See Also see "MIS: Challenges in an Evolving Market" - Medtech Insight, 1 May, 2011..) Also, surgical experience is still early for many of these procedures and evidence supporting clinical outcomes has been limited