A Look At Types Of Surgical Instruments And Their Uses

by Hospital Product Directory CEO

With the diversity and intricacy of surgical techniques, surgeons use different instruments to enhance their performance. To date, thousands of surgical instruments were established to support professional surgeons to complete their operations. Some surgical instruments bought from Surgical Instrument Dealers are intended for general use in different kinds of surgery, whereas others are highly-specific and used for specific surgeries. Given the high number of surgical instruments hired, young surgeons may find a challenge in recognizing and obtaining adequate knowledge about all instruments. Though, a simple arrangement of surgical instruments helps in enabling this process. Surgical instruments are essentially grouped according to their function. They are used for cutting, dividing, holding, grasping, occluding, fastening, withdrawing, sewing, dilating, …. etc. This article will review the rudimentary kinds of surgical instruments and their medical applications. Surgical instruments are organized according to their functional usage into the following groups:

Cutting and dismembering surgical instruments:

Many operating instruments are used for cutting skin, soft tissue, and even bones, or dismembering tissues through their anatomical planes. Some of these instruments are throwaway such as scalpels and razorblades, whereas others are refillable such as knives. Blades of diverse dimensions are used for particular operations. Some tools are intended for dissevering tough tissues such as Mayo scissors normally used by obstetricians and gynecologists for cutting tendons, while others are intended for dividing delicate tissues such as Metzenbaum scissors used by plastic surgeons for dividing intestinal mesentery. Bone curette typifies a common instrument in this cluster that is used by neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons for laminectomy in intervertebral disc operations. Other instances of surgical instruments used for cutting or dismembering are bone cutters, snares, blunt dissectors, biopsy tongs, and bunches.

Clasping and handling surgical instruments:

Surgeons use certain tools to grip or hold tissues to help to have a closer opinion of their surgical field. The most common surgical instruments used for this resolve are tongs (including tissue tongs, smoothed tongs, toothed tongs, Allis pincers, Babcock pincers, and stone pincers), tenaculum, and bone holders. Rat-toothed tongs are a shared surgical instrument used by general surgeons to grip the skin. Babcock tongs are used for gripping the intestine and towels.

Fastening and occluding surgical instruments:

Those instruments supplied by Surgical Instrument Dealers are mainly used for fastening blood vessels and/or other tissue to get them away from the field during operating procedures. They comprise hemostatic tongs, hemostats, crushing locks, and non-crushing vascular cramps.

Withdrawing and exposing instruments:

Retractors support surgeons to have a better conception of the operating field. Surgeons withdraw tissues away without injuring them by using those instruments. Balfour abdominal retractor is a shared instance of surgical instruments used in laparotomy for this purpose. Other instances comprise the Army navy and Farabeuf retractor. Some retractors, such as GELPI perineal retractors, are self-retaining, thus easing functioning field visualization. Pegs, such as skin, bone, or spay pegs, are used to withdraw skin edges in a wide-flap partition in mastectomy or face-lift operations. Some of these pegs are intended with rounded tips to diminish tissue trauma.

Instruments for refining visualization:

Special instruments are intended to view deep structures that cannot be understood externally. Speculums, endoscopes (resonating and lens endoscopes), anoscopes (for imagining the anus), and proctoscopes (for inspecting the anus and rectum) typify instruments of this category.

Sewing and stapling surgical instruments:

Sewing, as well as stapling, tools are intended to bring the edges of the skin and/or soft tissue head-to-head together. The typical sewing kit is composed of sewing material, a needle, a needle holder, a toothed tong, and a fine suturing scissor. Tools with tungsten carbide jaws are used to remove the turning and winding of the needle, improve instrument life and allow a better grip and balance.

Suctioning and aspiration instruments:

Surgical and dental fields may be jam-packed with blood and copious amount of liquids that unclear the fundamental structures. Surgeons, thus, use specific instruments to remove these liquids from their field.

Widening and probing instruments:

Widening instruments are used to enlarge the magnitude of an orifice such as the cervical os or the urethra. Dilators have different calibers fluctuating from small to large; surgeons start to use minor dilators and gradually surge the size of the dilator inserted to enlarge the orifice. Probes, on the other hand, are implanted into normal openings, such as the urethra, vagina, and common bile ducts, to discover these

Other more cutting-edge surgical instruments found with Surgical Instrument Dealers are used chiefly in ophthalmic surgeries, for example, corneal section shears, Piere micro scissors, and others.