Hypersonic vitrectomy: Novel technology for vitreous removal

Sunir J. Garg, MD, FACS, discusses the benefits of hypersonic vitrectomy as a novel technologic advancement for retinal surgeons in a presentation at the 2022 Retina World Congress.

Video transcript

Yeah, so hypersonic vitrectomy is one of the really most novel ways we have of removing vitreous, and our traditional guillotine cutters are really amazing. And as they've gotten faster and faster, they take smaller bites of the vitreous gel. And as you take smaller bites of the vitreous gel, you reduce viscosity. When you have less viscosity, you're able to remove the gel a lot more efficiently.

And over the past 10 to 15 years, our cutters went from 2500 cuts a minute to 15,000 cuts a minute to getting closer to 30,000 cuts a minute. But there's certain inherent limitations. Smaller bites are still small bites, but they're not tiny particles.

One of the other limitations of our standard guillotine cutters is they're a needle and needle design. And as you may remember from high school physics, the smaller you make a lumen, the exponentially more resistance you have. Hypersonic vitrectomy not only takes small little particles of the vitreous gel, but it doesn't have a needle and needle design. So the single lumen gives you an effectively larger internal radius, enabling you to remove the vitreous gel a lot more efficiently.

So we looked at a bunch of different cases using this technology. And we found that we could do pretty much a whole host of retinal surgeries with it: retinal detachments, retain lens material, silicone oil cases. And for a lot of cases, it was really great. And surgeons found that was particularly advantageous for removing vitreous gel in mobile retina. So in retinal detachment cases it was terrific. We could use that same port to remove retain lens materials, we didn't have to open up a frag in these cases. And some of my colleagues actually used it to remove silicone oil.

And it was kind of neat to be able to do basically the entire surgery with one instrument. There was a couple of cases in which I don't think anything's going to be better than a guillotine cutter, particularly in really thick, dense diabetic membranes. Using scissors or guillotine cutters are really fabulous. And there's a couple of cases that had a really kind of glassy, thick vitreous gel, that this didn't work that great, but honestly, neither did my guillotine cutter so I think that was just those cases.

One of the other potential advantages of this is you don't need gas, so you don't need big gas tanks and you don't need to be tethered to an operating room. So whether you're in places around the world that don't have easy access to those things, or whether you're looking at doing vitrectomy outside of the traditional or this might be really advantageous.

There are some limitations about it, you know, we're still refining the different port technologies. So one of the great things about this is you can change the port. So you can make it into a teardrop shape; you can make it into a sigmoid shape, and some of our new iterations seem to be a lot more efficient than our old ones.

We're also adjusting some of the parameters of the handpiece. One of the things that we found is by increasing the frequency, we can dramatically increase the force or the ability of the instrument to cut the vitreous gel. And we're currently working on a new sigmoid shape, which seems to be a major improvement over what we had before.

But considering that the technology is really new, and there's only been hundreds or maybe 1,000 cases done, I'm really impressed with how dramatically better the technology continues to get. And as we use it more often, I think we'll continue to refine it.

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.