Out-of-Body Treatment For Liver Cancer

Tangential writes "This is amazing. Liver cancer, dangerous to treat and often deadly. Dosing that part of your body with enough radiation to cure the cancer often does as much harm as good. If they could just remove your liver, send it down to the lab to be treated and put it back in. An Italian MD has done just that." There's a story at New Scientist as well.

Comments

Misleading article

[PD]

The reason they took out the liver is not to give it a bigger dose, it's so that the other structures in the body like bones don't reflect the radiation beams. With nothing in the way, the whole thing gets evenly done all the way around.

And they are using the boron neutron capture technique thingy for this. I'm guessing that the boron atoms, which are absorbed more into the rapidly growing cancers, absorb the neutrons from the radiation stream going by.

So what does it do then? Does the boron heat up when it absorbs a neutron, cooking the tumor but not the liver? Anyone who knows, clue me in.

Re:Misleading article

[Merlin42]

FBFA (Read Both Friendly Articles ;) ... from the new scientist article ...

The team has been working on the method since 1987 and has done extensive studies to work out the optimum dose. Two to four hours after the compound is given, a low-energy neutron beam is directed at the organ, splitting the boron into high-energy particles that mainly kill the cancer cells.