endoscope
Meaning of endoscope: A camera on the end of a steerable tube, and increasingly the instrument that performs the operation rather than merely finding it.
Definition of endoscope
An endoscope is a tube-shaped instrument passed into the body to view its interior directly. Modern versions carry a tiny electronic camera and a light at the tip, a steerable bending section, and channels through which air, water and slender instruments can be passed. It is introduced through a natural opening such as the mouth, or through a small surgical cut.
How endoscope is built
- endo- Prefix · Greek within, inner
- -scope Suffix · Greek instrument for viewing
A medical term is read from its ending backwards: the suffix first, then the prefix, then the root. See all 223 word parts.
How does the image get out?
Older instruments were bundles of glass fibers carrying light back to an eyepiece, and the picture was grainy and visible to one person at a time. Current instruments put an electronic sensor at the tip and send the picture out as a signal, so a whole team watches a bright image on a screen and the examination can be recorded. Illumination still travels the other way along fiber bundles from a lamp in the stack. Rigid versions serve where the path is short and straight, while flexible ones are steered by control wheels pulling wires that run the length of the shaft.
What can be done through it?
Far more than looking. The working channel turns an examination into an operation: tissue can be sampled, a polyp snared off, a bleeding vessel clipped or sealed, a narrowed segment stretched, a stent placed to hold a blocked passage open, a stone retrieved from the bile duct, or a feeding PEG tube pulled through the abdominal wall from the inside. Because nothing is cut through muscle, recovery is counted in hours rather than weeks, which is why so much surgery has migrated to this route.
How do the types differ?
| Type | Reaches | Instruments |
|---|---|---|
| Flexible upper scope | Gullet, stomach, first part of the bowel | Full working channel |
| Colonoscope | Large bowel | Full working channel |
| Rigid scope | Joints, abdomen, airway, bladder | Separate instrument ports |
| Capsule endoscope | Small bowel, by swallowing | None; it only photographs |
The swallowed camera fills a genuine gap, because the small bowel is too long and too coiled for a conventional instrument to travel in full. A wireless capsule endoscope sends out images as the gut carries it along and then passes naturally, but nothing can be sampled or treated with it, so a finding generally leads to a conventional procedure afterward.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The lesion was reached with a flexible endoscope and biopsied.
Good to know
A swallowed capsule camera photographs the bowel but carries no working channel, so nothing can be sampled or treated during it, and a finding leads on to a conventional endoscope.
Word origin
Where “endoscope” comes from
Endoscope joins the Greek endon, meaning within, with skopein, to look at.