It turns out your bellybutton is not useless. It's handy for abdominal surgery.

Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic are using navel operations to extract kidneys from donors. They say it sharply reduces recovery time, which might make it easier to persuade people to become donors.

The procedure involves a three-quarter inch incision in the interior of the bellybutton into which a tube-like port is inserted. The port has several round entry points for a camera and instruments. The incision is expanded to about an inch and a-half to extract the kidney.

So far, the technique has been tried on almost a dozen kidney donors. Recovery time is less than a month instead of the usual three months.

One doctor predicts bellybutton entry will be increasingly used for major abdominal surgery.