ELITE: A New Highly Immersive Surgical Phantom for NOTES

Today the evaluations of NOTES systems and techniques, furthermore the training, are performed on animals. This is, however, ethically not always maintainable. ELITE (endoscopic-laparo-scopic interdisciplinary training entity) is a new full-synthetic ex-vivo surgical training model that allows simulating “NOTES”-interventions like cholecystectomy, colonic-resection or appendectomy. The training entity was already successfully demon-strated on many medical workshops in education and the training of NOTES techniques. ELITE is a useful tool to train NOTES techniques before the implementation of the new techniques into practice in the animal lab.