Absorbable ligating clips.

Surgical clips have gained wide spread acceptance because of speed and utility in operative fields with difficult exposure. Certain disadvantages make metallic clips less than optimal for many operative situations. Such problems include difficulty in loading metallic clips into the applier, clips falling from the applier in the transfer from nurse to surgeon or while the surgeon is positioning the clip for application and clips coming off a vessel to which it was applied. The interference which metallic clips produce in computerized tomography and their permanency must be added as factors to be evaluated in comparison with absorbable clips.