laparoscope
Meaning of laparoscope: It is the eye of keyhole surgery: instruments enter through separate ports, and the whole team operates from one magnified screen image.
Definition of laparoscope
A laparoscope is a rigid telescope, roughly the diameter of a pen, passed through a small incision in the abdominal wall to view the organs inside. Fiber-optic strands carry light down the shaft, and either a rod-lens system or a camera chip at the tip returns the picture to a video monitor that the whole surgical team watches.
How laparoscope is built
- lapar/o Combining form · Greek abdomen, abdominal wall
- -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 is it built?
The shaft is a sealed metal tube that can be cleaned and sterilized between uses. Along it run two separate optical paths: fibers carrying light in from an external source, and a train of glass lens elements carrying the image back out. Newer designs place the sensor at the tip instead and send an electrical signal along a cable. The viewing angle is built into the tip, and it matters more than it sounds: a straight-ahead scope shows what lies directly in front, while an angled one can be rotated to look around a corner or up at the underside of an organ without moving the incision. Diameters vary, and a narrower scope allows a smaller incision at the cost of a dimmer, smaller image.
What else does it need to work?
| Item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Port, or trocar | Holds the incision open and seals around the instrument |
| Insufflator | Fills the abdomen with gas to create working space |
| Light source and cable | Supplies the intense cold light the fibers carry in |
| Camera and monitor | Turn the image into a shared magnified view |
Some laparoscopes are built with a working channel so an instrument can pass down the same tube. That design suits a quick biopsy, but most operations place instruments through separate ports, which gives far better angles.
How does it compare with a scan?
A scan produces an image of tissue including its interior, without any incision. A laparoscope gives direct magnified vision of surfaces only, and it requires anesthesia and small wounds. What it offers in exchange is action: tissue can be sampled, cut, stitched or removed during the same look, and the surface of the peritoneum, where deposits too small for any scan may sit, can be inspected directly.
Used in a sentence
A laparoscope was used to examine the abdominal organs during the minimally invasive procedure.
Good to know
A laparoscope allows both direct viewing and, alongside instruments, the removal of tissue in the same session, which distinguishes it from imaging methods that produce pictures without any access to tissue.
Word origin
Where “laparoscope” comes from
Formed from Greek lapara, meaning the flank or soft part of the body between ribs and hip, and skopein, meaning to look at or examine.