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Infant liver transplant successful with novel video, surgical device solution

A combined procedure using the Orbeye video microscope and Thunderbeat advanced energy surgical device from Olympus led to a successful liver transplantation in an infant patient at Holtz Children’s Hospital in Florida, according to a press release.

“This past Sunday’s July 28 was National World Hepatitis Awareness Day, a good reminder to think about liver health,” Randy Clark, president of the medical systems group at Olympus Corporation of the Americas, said in the release. “Although no one wants to be on a transplant list, we are proud to be a company that can give new hope to those patients who could benefit from transplantation because of liver disease.”

Alongside a multidisciplinary team, the surgery was led by Rodrigo Vianna, MD, PhD, director at the Miami Transplant Institute; Akin Tekin, MD, University of Miami Health System’s (UHealth) liver, intestinal and multivisceral surgeon; Thiago Beduschi, MD, UHealth’s surgical director of living donor liver program; and Gennaro Selvaggi, MD, FACS, UHealth’s transplant surgeon.

The infant patient required liver transplantation due to biliary atresia and received a liver graft from a larger donor liver.

“Liver cancer, NASH and hepatitis C have contributed to a rising need for liver transplantation, in an environment that is already limited in terms of donor organs,” Beduschi explained in the release. “It was a novel procedure in many other ways, from the baby’s size, to the degree to which we had to reduce the size of the donor liver, to the combined technologies that we used to achieve success.”

Reference: www.olympus.com