BACKGROUND Direct laryngoscopy of a patient lying on the ground is difficult because the intubator's head is far above the head of the patient, making alignment of the intubator's visual axis with the patient's tracheal axis difficult. The Airway Scope is a laryngoscope designed to facilitate tracheal intubation without requiring alignment of the oral, pharyngeal, and tracheal axes. We thus tes...

BACKGROUND Macintosh laryngoscopic intubation is a lifesaving procedure, but a difficult skill to learn. The Airtraq optical laryngoscope (AOL) is a novel intubation device with advantages over the direct laryngoscope for untrained personnel in a manikin study. We compared the effectiveness of AOL with Macintosh laryngoscope for tracheal intubation by novice personnel. METHODS We selected 37 ...

EACH year, one of the first skills anesthesia residents must master is direct visualization of the vocal cords to safely and successfully intubate the trachea of surgical patients. Debates have raged in teaching centers about the superiority of one laryngoscope over another or the merits of a straight versus a curved blade. However, this yearly debate is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, a...

BACKGROUND Intraoperative transesophageal echocardiography has become a routine part of monitoring in patients with cardiac disease. However, insertion of a transesophageal echocardiography probe can be associated with oropharyngeal, esophageal, and gastric injuries. The purpose of this study was to determine whether insertion of a transesophageal echocardiography probe under direct laryngoscop...

Patients with Pierre Robin syndrome are characterized by micrognathia, retrognathia, glossoptosis, and respiratory obstruction and are prone to have a difficult-to-intubate airway. The McGrath® MAC video laryngoscope provides a better view of the glottis than a Macintosh laryngoscope, but it is not easy to insert an endotracheal tube through the vocal cords because a video laryngoscope has a mu...

INTRODUCTION The direct laryngoscopy technique using a Macintosh blade is the first choice globally for most anaesthetists. In case of an unanticipated difficult airway, the complication rate increases with the number of intubation attempts. Recently, McGrath MAC (McGrath) video laryngoscopy has become a widely accepted method for securing an airway by tracheal intubation because it allows the ...

OBJECTIVES Endolaryngeal microsurgery using a direct laryngoscope is a well-established procedure in phonosurgery. Adequate laryngeal exposure is essential, but in some cases sufficient view of the glottis cannot be obtained, leading to treatment failure. This study reports how to manage vocal fold lesions in difficult laryngeal exposure (DLE) cases. METHODS From 2003 to 2009, 212 patients un...