New dawn in cancer treatment
With SRS microscopy technology, surgery in brain cancer treatment will no longer be done on the basis of guesswork
With SRS microscopy technology, surgery in brain cancer treatment will no longer be done on the basis of guesswork
Cancer treatment is one of the most crucial and risky treatment profiles in the medical field. A lot of times during treatment, especially while carrying out surgery, surgeons rely on guesswork and abandon the procedure prematurely and the results are more often fatal.
To avoid this guesswork in surgery, The University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University have unveiled Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy technology to be used in cancer treatment procedures. This new technology allows the surgical decision-making process to become data driven, thus improve the accuracy of brain tumour surgery through real time microscopic visualization of tissue from the operating room.
Accurate results
“This technology is unique because it generates microscopic images, but it doesn’t require any fixation, processing, dying of the tissues, so what it allows us to do is in real time without any delay by tissue processing. This ability to differentiate on a microscopic scale between tumour and normal brain allows us to provide more accurate surgical results,” explains Dr Daniel Orringer, Assistant Professor Neurological Surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Cancer treatment technique
This technique was tried on more than 360 patients at the University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University. BBC News reports that the technology can help surgeons rapidly analyse brain cancers and decide how much tissue to remove.
The aim of the SRS microscopy technology, explains Dr. Orringer, is to give more efficient, safer and more accurate care.
“It makes a huge difference, the process currently in place dates back to the 1800s, and we have something disruptive, in a good way, and the implications are pretty profound,” he notes.
With this new technology, researchers at the University of Michigan anticipate that there will be many applications for this technology, not just in brain tumour surgery but in operations where the margins of a tumour are indistinct, such as head, neck cancer and breast cancers.
“Optimising the surgical results ultimately optimizes patient outcome, improves quality of life and survivorship of the patients who suffer from these disorders,” says Dr. Orringer.
