Watch how Sinus Surgery can be used to treat chronic maxillary cheek sinusitis

Thomas Lamperti, MD narrates an intra-operative video of a sinus surgery procedure showing how the cheek sinus is opened up. He also shows how nasopore dissolvable packing is placed in the nose after surgery.

Video Transcript:

"This is Dr. Thomas Lamperti. Today I'm going to about how to open up the cheek sinus during a sinus surgery. The technical name for this procedure is a maxillary antrostomy. This terminology comes from the fact that we're opening up the maxillary sinus and the antrum is the window or opening of the sinus. Our first step is to perform an uncinectomy. This is what we're doing right now as we incise the mucosa or skin lining over the uncinate process.  The uncinate process is the shelf of tissue that lays right in front of the natural maxillary atrium or opening. You can see just a part of it there as we make an incision in the uncinate. And as the name implies an uncinectomy involves removing this tissue. So were using a device to remove this portion of thin bone and skin lining. And now we're using a shaver or micro-debrider to shave some of that excess tissue and fine tune the edges. When people conceive of sinus surgery they often think of a roto-rooter procedure and this device is probably the most analogous to that. This view shows you the device and the shaver blade. There is also irrigation that goes through as it suctions also. And this allows us to remove the tissue that we need to remove, including polyps in certain cases, while sparing any mucosa or skin lining that we don't want to injure. This device is called a back-biter. You can see why we call it that. This is allowing me to remove some additional tissue and open up the cheek sinus further. And now we're placing some dissolvable packing. In most cases in my practice this is the extent of the packing that I'll place during sinus surgery -- and it is dissolvable. As you can see there is still quite a bit of room still in the nose and you're still able to breathe through your nose if you like. And this packing will dissolve over time and you do salt water rinses and flushes. This packing has two roles. The first is to stop the oozing from the cut edges and also to help prevent adhesions or scar bands."