Endoscopic carotid surgery

Excerpt

We thank Dr Zayyan for his comment on our experimental model for endoscopic carotid surgery. We agree that establishing the safety of endoscopic carotid surgery for clinical diseases would require a survival experiment. Dr Zayyan, however, probably overlooked that our aim, as stated in our article, was instead to develop a model and verify the technical feasibility of performing carotid dissection, arteriotomy, suturing, and patch closure. Performing a survival study before knowing whether an endoscopic approach to the carotid artery was at all feasible would have exposed animals to an unpredictable and unnecessary degree of distress. We think our study shows that the porcine model works well as a tool for developing minimally invasive carotid artery surgery. Admittedly, moving from our experimental experience to a clinical application would be a great leap, but the model we have proposed is not “meaningless,” because it can now be used to test safety issues, particularly the risk of stroke, possible refinements of the technique, and all other necessary assessments that can pave the way to its clinical application. …