A COMPARISON OF THE PRESSURE FAILURE OF TWO COLORECTAL ANASTAMOSES STAPLING TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Anastomotic leakage (AL) is a serious complication that effects thousands of patients undergoing colorectal surgery annually. Stapling is generally used to perform anastomoses. Two common anastomosis techniques are the End to End (EE), and End to Side (ES). Currently there is no experimental approach to compare the effectiveness of these two techniques against AL. This work proposes an ex-vivo experimental setup of burst testing of anastomoses using porcine tissues. Twelve pigs were used with three specimens harvested from the colon of each of them: EE, ES, and a control specimen. Failure of the anastomoses were monitored, and the corresponding leakage pressures were recorded. Preliminary results indicated that ES led to higher strength than EE.