At Wood Street Vet Hospital, we have always been keen to find new and better ways of treating our patients, your pets.
Keyhole surgery has a variety of different technical names - laparoscopy in the abdomen (belly)and thoracoscopy in the chest, or arthroscopy when it involves joints - but the basic principle is to use a small sterile telescopic camera to look inside the body and identify problems, obtain samples, or carry out a procedure (like removing the gallbladder or taking piece of liver). Our vets have been using keyhole techniques in pets for more than ten years now- you'd find it tricky to discover any other vets with a similar level of experience in these procedures!
One of the most common operations we carry out is laparascopic ovariectomy- basically a way of neutering (spaying) the female dog taking out the ovaries via two tiny incisions and leaving everything else inside the belly just as it was. We have now carried out hundreds of these procedures and we find that, especially for larger dogs, this is a far less traumatic surgery than the traditional method, so results in less postoperative discomfort as well as a faster return to normal exercise.
There are many other keyhole procedures we regularly perform, from taking out undescended testicles, to taking biopsies of the liver and other organs, and taking samples from other areas within the chest such as lung or growths.