Northwell’s vascular surgery department just got a high-tech upgrade.
The hospital’s newest $6.1 million hybrid operating room, located in New Hyde Park’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, will allow surgeons to complete more complicated vascular surgeries with greater precision, efficiency, and safety, said Dr. Gregg Landis, the chief of vascular surgery for Northwell.
“Long Island Jewish is a very busy vascular surgery center,” said Landis, who has worked with Northwell for 12 years and has been heavily involved in the design of this room for the past two. “We take care of a large number of vascular surgery patients and want to ensure that this hospital has state-of-the-art equipment.”
Landis, who described vascular surgeons as the blood vessel doctors of the body, explained that vascular surgery focuses on veins and arteries. Common procedures that will be performed in this room include aortic aneurism repairs, or relieving balloon-like bulges in the body’s main artery, and carotid stenting, or opening up blocked neck arteries to prevent strokes, which Landis said he would most frequently be performing in the room.
What makes this hybrid operating room different from a typical operating room is the state-of-the-art technology that allows surgeons to quickly access extensive patient information while operating and smoothly combine conventional open surgical procedures with minimally invasive stent procedures, where a small, expandable tube is placed to open up blocked arteries.
“Traditionally, we would go through one of the arteries in the groin and place a stent in that artery,” Landis said of carotid stent procedures. “But, with one of these hybrid approaches, we would be able to make a very small incision above the collar bone and put the stent directly in there. That can only be done in a room such as this, and it makes the procedure significantly safer.”
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Among other technological advancements, the room is equipped with Siemens imaging platforms, which Landis said allow surgeons to create 3D models of blood vessels while conducting surgery and decrease the amount of time patients are exposed to radiation. It also has Brainlab’s digital integration system, which allows surgeons to pull up all of a patient’s information while operating.
“This allows us to tackle problems that previously were unable to be tackled,” Landis said. For example, he explained, the hybrid, high-tech room allows surgeons to avoid amputating a patient’s limb in some cases when operating on those with limb-threatening peripheral artery diseases like complex atherosclerotic blockages.
“There’s a new procedure we do at Northwell called LimFlow, where we take patients who would have otherwise needed an amputation, and combine approaches and save their leg,” Landis said. “It converts what was a hopeless situation into something fixable.”
He said the operating room, which is 956 square feet, is the fourth room of this caliber across Northwell’s buildings.
“The hospital has always provided patients with high-quality vascular care,” Landis said. “But,” he added, “This gives us an added measure of sophistication and really allows the patients to have cutting-edge technology commensurate with every major healthcare system in the country. It allows us to really step up the level of complexity that we’re able to manage.”
