BPH Resection, Vaporization, Enucleation - PLASMA

Olympus provides a full variety of premium-quality and innovative electrodes for PLASMA treatment in urology, thus enabling surgeons to perform exactly the procedures and operation techniques that achieve the best clinical results for each patient. With resection loops in different sizes and angles, oval and round vaporization buttons, and a special enucleation loop, the Olympus PLASMA system provides solutions for different prostate sizes and anatomies and different patient profiles, such as high-risk patients and patients who want the ability to maintain antegrade ejaculations. PLASMA, therefore, is the answer to the trend of more personalized treatments in surgery.

With PLASMA each surgeon can offer the best-fitting treatment option to his patient by being able to perform a resection, a vaporization, or an enucleation, depending on the patient’s needs and profile, and even change the technique during the procedure. (January 2017)

Prof. Dr. Jörg Raßler
Urology Department, St. Elisabeth-Krankenhaus, Leipzig

Transurethral resection remains the most common treatment for BPH and NMIBC. For PLASMA resections, bipolar HF current is used to create the PLASMA corona that vaporizes prostatic or vesical tissue.

Apart from applying various technical approaches (Nesbit, Barnes, etc.), resections can be done using a wide variety of color-coded electrodes for prostate and bladder procedures. The choice will depend on the procedure and telescopes used. Specifically,

PLASMA vaporization provides a safe, easy-to-use solution for TUR tissue management procedural needs in which energized gas smoothly vaporizes the tissue. The vaporization electrode’s new, optimized oval shape, combined with the easy-to-learn “hovering technique,” enables effective, fast ablating and virtually bloodless smooth tissue vaporization.

This revolutionary technique uses the natural anatomy by “peeling” prostate tissue out of the capsule. Once the right layers have been located, each prostate lobe is peeled off in one piece. For complete enucleation the lobes are pushed into the bladder, where they are fragmented by a morcellator.
In the case of incomplete enucleation the removed lobes are still connected with the capsule through an adenoma bridge and are then resected with a PLASMA loop. For the treatment of large prostates, transurethral enucleation with bipolar (TUEB) provides an alternative to laser enucleation.