Novel endoscope system with plasma flushing for off-pump cardiac surgery.

The purpose of this study is to develop a new endoscope for performing simple surgical tasks inside a cardiac atrium/chamber filled with blood, i.e., for performing "off-pump" cardiac surgeries. In general, it is very difficult to observe the inner wall of the vessels containing circulating blood because the light from the endoscope is scattered by the red blood cells. "Plasma flushing" performed using the separator system is developed to observe the inner side of the heart filled with blood and to remove blood cells from the front of the endoscope tip. The system was used in in vitro quantitative measurement of the device performance and in vivo experiments on a swine. In these experiments, we successfully obtained high-resolution images of the interior of the heart during off-pump surgery.