Development and application of confined blasting for bladder and kidney stones

Microexplosion lithotripsy (MEL) was clinically developed for the destruction of urinary stones in our clinic in 1981. In MEL two kinds of blasting are available: external charge blasting and confined blasting. The detonation power of the latter is 3 times larger than that of the former. Up to July, 1986, microexplosion cystolithotripsy has been successfully performed on 100 cases. In the early stages only external charge blasting was used. It was, however, not easy to crush a big bladder stone over 5 cm in diameter. For that reason, confined blasting was newly developed and in 50 cases microexplosion cystolithotripsy using confined blasting was completed successfully. As the next step, percutaneous nephrolithotripsy using confined blasting has been successfully performed on 12 cases including 3 of staghorn calculi.