70% of all surgeries in Moscow are now performed with laparoscopy – without an incision, said a Moscow Government Minister and Head of the Department of Healthcare Alexei Khripun at the XVII Moscow Health assembly.
Moscow hospitals are increasingly converting from open surgery to innovative intraluminal endoscopic and X-ray endovascular technology. This has allowed surgeons to perform minimally invasive surgery on over 15,000 patients with gastrointestinal tumors.
In the course of the past three years, Moscow neurosurgeons have performed a total of 1,900 high-tech surgeries with the Gamma-Knife radiotherapeutic device, said Moscow’s Department of Healthcare’s chief neurosurgeon, Andrei Grin.
This is a technique to remove brain tumours with radioactive gamma rays rather than scalpels. Fine tuning allows directing the rays at the tumour and destroying the affected cells’ DNA without damaging healthy tissues.
“In 2018, Moscow specialists performed a total of 100,000 minimally invasive laparoscopic surgeries and over 1,000 robotically-assisted surgeries, which allowed patients to recover faster,” Khripun noted.
This year, the city purchased its first robotic system for brain surgery, thus allowing Moscow doctors to perform Russia’s first robotically-assisted neurosurgical procedure at Sklifosovsky Research Institute of Emergency Medicine.