place of laparoscopy in acute abdomen

Laparoscopy offers a simple safe and rapid mean of evaluation and diagnosis of intrabdominal diseases when the indications for laparotomy are equivocal. In this study laparoscopy was employed in 60 patients with acute abdomen. Three categories of patients were included, those with queery acute appendicitis [40 patients], those with blunt abdominal trauma [10 patients] and those with a provisional diagnosis of acute cholecystitis [10 patients]. Laparoscopy was done for every case for diagnosis and proceed accordingly.It was concluded that, laparoscopy is a very useful procedure in managing the patient who complained of acute abdominal pain and indication for laparotomy is equivocal. So the main value of laparoscopy in such cases were either avoiding unnecessary laparotomy or proceeding laparoscopically or ending into laparotomy

Autogenous superficial femoral vein graft in trauma to large - sized arteries in dogs

The long saphenous vein [LSV] is the preferred vascular graft for arterial trauma to small- and medium-sized vessels. However, there may be a mismatching between LSV diameter and that of large-sized injured arteries. In such cases an alternate graft should be used instead. We had tried to evaluate the use of the autogenous superficial femoral vein [SFV] graft in arterial trauma in 11 dogs. In each dog we had excised a 4-cm segment from the femoral artery at one side and replaced it by an equal segment taken from the contralateral SFV after its reversal and irrigation with heparinized saline. Postoperative follow-up was done for one month when patency was confirmed by angiography. There was neither venous insufficiency in the donor limb nor infection in the recipient limb. We could conclude that the early results showed the SFV to be an acceptable and a feasible arterial substitute in vascular trauma to large-sized arteries without significant morbidity or mortality. However, we recommend a longer period of follow-up to detect any possible late complications such as aneurysmal dilatation or neointimal hyperplasia in the vein graft or late chronic venous insufficiency in the donnor limb