Diagnostic Endoscopy

As mentioned earlier, Endoscopy makes use of a telescope to view the interiors of the body, thus eliminating the need to open the organ by incisions. A telescope is made up of tip, shaft and eye-piece. The shaft is made up of rod lenses that pick up and focus the image onto the eye-piece of the telescope. This shaft and its optic assembly is of varying diameter for different applications. But image formation requires illumination of the anatomy. Without the organ’s interiors being lit up, nothing can be seen. For this reason, Endoscopy requires a light source that would illuminate the organs. Thus, a surgeon has to have a telescope to insert inside the body and a light source to illuminate the organ. The telescope is inserted through small holes. Normally, the organs inside the body are densely packed and the surgeon finds it difficult to differentiate them unless they are separated from each other. The separation is also required so as to help the surgeon to operate only on the affected organs and not on the normal ones. Hence, to enable the separation, distention of the body cavity is required. This is either achieved by passing gas or liquid. Either of the medium keeps the cavity inflated throughout the procedure. In small cavities, this distention is achieved using fluid and in large cavities, gas is used. Fluid also helps in cleaning up of the debris formed due to surgical procedures. Thus, besides the telescope and light source, Endoscopy also requires gas or fluid medium to distend the body cavity under study. For diagnostic Endoscopy, the above-mentioned equipment is the bare minimum requirement.

As is evident, the surgeon views the affected and/or normal organs through the scope. Such a scope that allows the surgeon to place his/her eye in front of the eye-piece and view the organs is called Direct-View Scope. Direct-View scopes are enough to see inside the body but are very tiresome for the surgeon because he/she has to constantly look through the eye-piece. To make it easier for surgeons, video systems have been developed that pick up the images from eye-piece of telescope, process the images and project them onto a monitor for viewing. These video systems are commonly called as camera systems. Though camera system is not strictly required, it has gained the position of indispensable equipment as it allows the surgeon to do a lot more with the image than only view it. Detailed advantages of a camera system are specified in the unit dedicated to camera system.