PEAK Surgical Inc last week released results from a preclinical study demonstrating that its PlasmaBlade cut freshly excised human abdominal tissue with little thermal tissue injury compared with traditional electrosurgery.

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The PEAK PlasmaBlade is a low-temperature tissue dissection tool that uses pulsed plasma energy to create surgical incisions and control bleeding. It is based on proprietary technology.
Medgadget did a nice job of covering this still-in-development product in its blog entry titled, Peak PlasmaBlade Wants to Be The New Bovie.

The company cannot stand the 1920's technology behind the bovie, and how its thermal function destroys healthy patient tissue around the cut. What do we hate about the bovie? Well, you know: all those bovie induced burns and destroyed gloves that surgeons are regularly subjected to.

Long story short, PEAK Surgical wants its Peak PlasmaBlade, a cold cutter and coagulator, to be the bovie of the 21st century. The company is quite hopeful: a new study presented in a poster session at the ongoing American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' (ACOG) 56th Annual Clinical Meeting in New Orleans showed that PEAK PlasmaBlade™ "cut freshly excised human abdominal tissue with little thermal tissue injury compared with traditional electrosurgery."

More information about this technology can be found here. As well, the vendor has offered a [removed]white paper[/removed] that offers considerable detail about the product.