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World J Gastrointest Endosc. Jul 10, 2015; 7(8): 814-818
Published online Jul 10, 2015. doi: 10.4253/wjge.v7.i8.814
Towards the Holy Grail: What can we do for truly scarless surgery?
Hai Hu, An-An Xu
Hai Hu, An-An Xu, Department of Minimally Invasive Surgery, East Hospital of Tongji University, Shanghai 200120, China
Author contributions: Hu H and Xu AA equally contributed to this paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Hu H and Xu AA have no conflict of interest or financial ties to disclose.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Hai Hu, MD, Professor, Department of Minimally Invasive Surgery, East Hospital of Tongji University, 150 Jimo Road, Pudong, Shanghai 200120, China. huhailc@sina.com
Telephone: +86-21-38804518
Received: August 26, 2014
Peer-review started: August 26, 2014
First decision: November 27, 2014
Revised: April 15, 2015
Accepted: April 27, 2015
Article in press: April 29, 2015
Published online: July 10, 2015
Processing time: 322 Days and 22.4 Hours
Abstract

The work of Muhe and Mouret in the late 1980s, paved the way for mainstream laparoscopic procedures and it rapidly became the mainstream method for many intra-abdominal procedures. Natural orifice transluminal surgery (NOTES) and Laparo-endoscopic single-site surgery (LESS) are very exciting new modalities in the field of minimally invasive surgery which work for further reducing the scars of standard laparoscopy and towards scarless surgery. However, according to objective assessment of the literatures, there is no clearly demonstrated benefit of NOTES (LESS), even cosmesis is poorly supported and had mixed results in the available data. NOTES (LESS) is far from the truly scarless surgery. Towards the Holy Grail, we have developed several techniques of creating nonvisible scar and named them as “Scar-hidden Endoscopic Surgery”. With the rapid development of science and technology, we believe that minimally invasive surgery over the next 2 decades will continue to bring remarkable change and realize truly scarless surgery even we may not be able to imagine what lies ahead.

Keywords: Minimally invasive surgery; Scarless surgery; Laparo-endoscopic single-site surgery; Natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery; Scar-hidden endoscopic surgery

Core tip: Natural orifice transluminal surgery (NOTES) and Laparo-endoscopic single-site surgery (LESS) are very exciting new modalities in the field of minimally invasive surgery which towards scarless surgery. However, according to objective assessment, NOTES (LESS) is far from the truly scarless surgery. Towards the Holy Grail, we have developed several techniques of creating nonvisible scar and named them as “Scar-hidden endoscopic surgery”. With the rapid development of science and technology, we believe that minimally invasive surgery over the next 2 decades will continue to bring remarkable change and realize truly scarless surgery.