While surgeries for treating esophageal cancer used to leave two large incision scars or several small scars on the patient, now doctors are able to leave only about three to four small scars on the patient, with a single-incision minimally invasive surgery first performed at National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH), the hospital said.
Esophageal cancer is among the 10 most common types of cancer in the nation, where causes of death are led by cancer, the hospital said, adding that surgery is used as the main treatment for long-term survival .
As the surgery involves rebuilding a new esophagus after removing parts of the esophagus and some of the cancerous tissue, the incisions might span from the neck to the chest and abdomen, it said, adding that traditional open surgery usually requires two large incisions.
The more advanced endoscopic surgery can reduce the amount of incisions to about eight small holes on the chest and abdomen, but some patients might need more than 10 small incisions for the surgery to be completed, head of NTUH’s Department of Thoracic Surgery Lee Chang-ming (李章銘) said.
The hospital said its surgical teams had made progress with the use of flexible endoscopes and began performing single-incision minimally invasive surgery on esophageal cancer patients.
The surgery can be accomplished with one small incision on the chest and one on the abdomen, with at most three to four small incisions, it said.
When the first minimally invasive surgery was successfully performed at the hospital in 2014, the institution became the first in the world to achieve that result.
In the past three years, they have performed more than 60 surgeries, Lee said.
The patients experience less pain after the surgery with this method, he said.
The hospital said clinical results of the single-incision surgery for treating esophageal cancer have been published in medical journals, but patients still need to consult with their doctors to assess if the surgery is appropriate for treating their condition.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS