New Procedure Allows Suspicious Polyp Removal without Surgery

A new less invasive procedure may help to successfully remove suspicious polyps that could potentially be cancerous.

As only 15 percent of all polyps turn out to be malignant, many patients may be unnecessarily subjected to certain risks of major surgery. Fortunately, a team of UCLA researchers and gastroenterologists have performed a new minimally invasive procedure to remove large and hard-to-reach polyps that keep the colon intact.

This procedure combines two minimally invasive techniques that are currently only performed at a handful of medical centers in the United States.  

"The CELS approach combines the best of minimally invasive techniques and may prove to be a viable option for select patients," said senior author Dr. James Yoo, an assistant professor of surgery and chief of the colon and rectal surgery program for the UCLA Health System and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, according to a press release.

The team looked at the outcomes for five patients who underwent the new procedure with outcomes for nine patients that received standard surgery to remove suspicious polyps between August 2008 and October 2012.

The press release notes the following regarding the procedure: "The new technique starts out like a colonoscopy, with a gastroenterologist advancing an endoscope inside the colon. The endoscope, a device with a small video camera and a light attached, lets doctors look inside the body cavity. Once a polyp is in sight and the gastroenterologist is ready to remove it, the surgeon uses minimally invasive surgical tools, inserted through two to four tiny incisions in the abdomen, to carefully maneuver and manipulate the colon, allowing the gastroenterologist better access to the polyp."

Once the polyp is removed, it's immediately taken to a lab for analysis and further testing to determine if it's benign or cancerous. This process takes approximately 30 minutes, according to the study.

Researchers note that the procedure lasted approximately 159 minutes, compared to 205-minute standard surgery, with median hospital stay of one night with five nights for the standard procedure.

According to the UCLA report, all polyps were successfully removed with the new CELS procedure, and the complication rate was lower than with standard surgery. Four out of the five patients who had the CELS procedure, and six out of nine patients who received standard surgery, were found to have benign polyps.

"The majority of patients in the study had a benign polyp," Yoo said. "We found that the new procedure can be performed safely with outcomes that compare favorably with standard surgery for these select patients."

Researchers said they hope this procedure will be become more widely available at other medical facilities in time.

The study can be found in the June issue of the journal Surgical Endoscopy.