Are The Automatic Retractors Indispensable for Optimal Exposure in Upper Gastrointestinal Surgeries?

Abstract

Optimal incision and exposure is one of the crucial steps for successful abdominal surgery. Thus, how to open and expose the surgical field is a very important issue particularly in upper abdominal operations. Various types of incisions were proposed in order to obtain optimal exposure in upper abdominal procedures but most of them depends on automatic retractors. In this article, we present a simple and useful technique, which we obtained by combining bilateral subcostal incision with simple traction sutures without using an automatic retractor, and which we believe provides satisfactory exposure.