Endoscopic Breast Augmentation

In this innovative country of ours, you could probably name any surgery that comes to mind and there would be an array of methods for doing it. Whenever a new surgical procedure is devised, medical professionals immediately begin to work on improving it, making it safer, making it available to more people, easier, faster, more painless. This is especially true of cosmetic surgeries, which are optional. Who will choose to have a long, complicated, painful procedure if there’s an alternative short, easy and painless one?

In the matter of breast augmentation surgery, you can choose between silicone gel implants and saline implants. You can have the implants smooth or textured on the surface. You can have them round or teardrop in shape. You choose from many sizes.

And you can choose where to have your incision. No woman wants to have a major surgery done to improve her breasts and end up with scars on them. So the choices of incision site are all designed to hide the inevitable two scars.

· In the armpits – they are nowhere to be seen, even in the scantiest of bikinis, unless you lie on the beach with your arms above your head. Even then, they will be small and inconspicuous.

· Underneath each breast – they’ll be invisible unless you want to show them to someone.

· Around the areolas where the skin changes – the change in skin texture and color will camouflage them nicely.

All these locations are close to where the implant will be positioned. There’s also a fourth choice offered by only some cosmetic surgeons – in the navel.

The TUBA Incision Site

TUBA stands for Trans Umbilical Breast Augmentation. An incision at the belly button might seem odd at first. Why so far away? How would your cosmetic surgeon move the implants up from there to the chest?

Use of an Endoscope

Imagine a long, thin, flexible tube with a tiny light and camera at its tip. It’s connected to a computer and the monitor is next to you. Your cosmetic surgeon can insert it through a small incision in the navel and gently thread it up to the chest area. He can see exactly what he’s doing on the monitor and also through an eyepiece at his end of the endoscope.

So endoscopically, your plastic surgeon can insert a folded-up breast implant, because the tube has a channel which holds medical implements or devices.

Advantages of TUBA

· Only one incision is needed rather than one on each side of the body

· Because the endoscopic tube is narrow and saline breast implants can be inserted folded and empty, it can be a small incision

· The contours of the belly button will camouflage it beautifully

· The endoscope can be used for exploratory work. If anything were to require follow-up checking after your procedure, the plastic surgeon could re-use the same incision and examine the area with an endoscope. Saline implants can possibly rupture and start leaking. This would not harm you, as saline solution is benign, being exactly matched in saltiness to the body’s natural fluids. It would be absorbed uneventfully by the body. But the implant would need to be replaced, and that would be a simple matter using the endoscope.

A limitation on endoscopic breast augmentation is that you cannot choose to have silicone gel implants. They come pre-filled and sealed and would be too large. But saline implants are filled after being positioned and when inserted, they are a small, folded object.