Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    A DOCUMENTARY recording how a new approach to thoracic surgery has changed people’s lives premiered in China at the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital on Friday, with the surgeon who created the technique and the Oscar-nominated director present.

    “This is Life” depicts how Diego Gonzalez Rivas, a Spanish surgeon who became the first in the world to perform single port thoracoscopic surgery in 2010, changed his patients’ lives in the four years following the creation of the technique. Thoracic surgery is performed mainly to remove part of the lung for lung cancer sufferers.

    Dani Lopez met Rivas in 2010, a few months after his ex-wife died of lung cancer at 29. Lopez said before the premiere that he hopes more patients will discover that this option exists and that it will give some of them a second chance at life.

    During the procedure, one very small (2cm to 3cm) incision is made, instead of more conventional video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) or traditional open surgery, Alan Sihoe, a doctor with the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital, told reporters.

    In comparison to VATS, which utilizes multiple incisions, Rivas’ method shows that less really is more, Sihoe explained. There is less pain, less recovery time and less scarring for patients with no sacrifice in quality, he said. With the conventional VATS surgery, a patient won’t be released until four to five days afterwards, while the single-portal surgery requires three days of recovery, he said.

    The great pain patients experienced following open thoracic surgery prompted Rivas to search for a new approach to it. He studied three-portal and two-portal thoracic surgery in the United States and found there were improvements he could make. Standard three-port VATS techniques use a cross-body approach, as ports are spread in a triangular configuration. Surgeons then work within these angles to position their instruments, performing delicate operations such as lung resections. Unfortunately this configuration sacrifices the visibility made available with traditional techniques, which use one very large (10 to 20 cm) incision.

    Three-port approaches also force surgeons into anatomically uncomfortable positions for the duration of the surgery. Surgeons are forced to contort their bodies and adopt an uncomfortably wide stance to be able to easily manipulate all of the instruments simultaneously. These challenges led Rivas to conceive of and develop single-port surgery. To the surprise of the thoracic surgery community, the single-port approach quells many of the difficulties. By inserting all of the instruments in the same port of the camera, surgeons gain visibility and maneuverability without sacrificing ergonomics.

    Lung cancer remains the top killer for residents of Shenzhen and the rest of the country. Last year, 2,234 Shenzhen residents were found to have lung cancer, the most among all kinds of cancer, official statistics show.

    Rivas is on a tour of China to promote the use of this method. While he recommended a background in traditional VATS and dual-port thoracoscopy, he said this is not necessary for experienced thoracic surgeons. In fact, he said that his thoracic surgery fellows are able to perform the technique easily with minimal assistance.