A new blade for the bookwalter retractor system

The table-fixed Bookwalter retractor system has been widely adopted in abdominal surgery, and during the past 15 or more years, we have succeeded in using the retractor system for thousands of cases operated on at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan. However, for some surgical procedures, such as gastrectomy, the blades that are currently available do not adequately hold deeper organs or tissue, such as the liver. We have successfully designed and fabricated a blade for grasping deeper tissue or organs, which is reusable and cost-effective. The shape of this new blade is described.