Laser technology could help oncologists remove brain cancer
A study has shown that lasers could aid surgeons in quickly analyzing brain cancers and deciding how much tissue to remove during surgery as taking too little leads to the cancer coming back, while too much could lead to disability.
The technique, called SRS microscopy, has been tried on more than 360 patients at the University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University.The next stage is for it to be tested in full clinical trials.
“Brain cancer is like a cloud, you can define the center, but the edges are really hard to discern,” says one of the researchers, Dr. Daniel Orringer.
In other cancers – such as in the bowel – doctors would just take some of the non-essential surrounding tissue as well.However, there is no non-essential tissue in the brain.
At the moment, sections of brain tissue are taken to a lab to be frozen, stained with dyes and then analyzed. The process can take 30-40 minutes. The technology sits in the operating theatre. It fires a beam of light at the tissue, and the laser-light’s properties are changed depending on what it hits.
The differing chemistry of a cancerous cell and normal brain tissue means the laser help surgeons find the outside edge of a tumor. No decisions were made with just the laser-technology while it was still being tested.
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