Doctors perform stealth surgery on 4-year-old

CHENNAI: In what is being claimed as an achievement of sorts, doctors in a private medical college in the city have performed a stealth surgery on a four-year-old boy to remove a benign tumour from his back. The surgery left no scars and the boy was discharged the following day.Dr Prakash Agarwal, Professor of Paediatric Surgery, Sri Ramachandra Medical College, said the boy was brought to the hospital with a swelling on the back that had been growing for the past three months. Typically, the tumour would have been removed with an incision on the skin. But the doctors decided to perform stealth surgery, which would cause less pain and would not leave a scar.Dr Agarwal said that they used the usual laproscopic instruments for the surery. The incisions were made in the arm pits and the tumour was extracted. “This surgery is common in the US where they use robotic instruments. Here we use the good old laproscopic instruments. It has recently come to India and is usually done on adults,” Dr Agarwal said. “In March we had a conference in Hyderabad where a faculty member from the US showed us this procedure in paediatrics. A doctor in Jabalpur and we, here, are doing it.”The surgery was an extension of laproscopy to the subcutaneous body surface. Using this method, tumours as big as 10 cm can be removed from patients, Dr Agarwal said.