Preservation of the parathyroid glands during thyroid surgery is important to preserve postoperative parathyroid function. However, macroscopic identification of the parathyroid glands in the surgical field is difficult because normal parathyroid glands are small and resemble lymph nodes or fat tissues. Recently, the detection of the parathyroids using near-infrared imaging has been reported. In this study, we applied ORBEYE, a three-dimensional surgical exoscope system, to four cases of thyroidectomy and examined whether the near-infrared mode of ORBEYE is useful for the intraoperative identification of the parathyroid glands. We demonstrated that the ORBEYE can be an effective surgical instrument in thyroid surgery, and it is necessary to accumulate more cases and examine the usefulness of this method in the future. J. Med. Invest. 73 : 208-211, February, 2026.
Kageyama et al. (Thu,) studied this question.