Clinical Problem/Translational Importance

Therapeutic endoscopic procedures in the upper gastrointestinal tract are becoming more common practice and include mucosal resection and submucosal dissection for resecting early neoplastic lesions. With the currently available methods, however, despite the usage of double-channel endoscope, manipulation of the lesion being resected is quite limited by the nature of the single point manipulation of an endoscope, leading to prolonged or discontinuation of a procedure.

In the future, with emerging modes of screening test becoming available, more number of early gastrointestinal tract tumors will be discovered, leading to increased endoscopic therapies than open surgical interventions, which would be reserved for more advanced stage tumors. In addition, having a second independent grasper capability will improve upon the closure of resected location by allowing approximation of the margins more easily – this will, in turn, enables the secure closure of an intentional or unintentional wall defect created during the therapeutic procedure.

In order to optimize the endoscopic therapy, improvements in the development of the endoscopic accessories are needed for minimizing the time of the procedure and the ease of operative maneuvering.

Desired Outcome

Our intended goal is to design and produce a 3-dimentional maneuverable forceps – which upon exiting from the channel or accessary port of an endoscope, be able to grasp the tissue being resected/dissected and move it away from the therapeutic endoscopic field for easier completion of the treatment as well as brings together the margins of widely resected mucosa/submucosa of gastrointestinal tract. Such a device would have additional utility in any single-port procedures used in other interventional procedures.