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

Re:Fine for the liver, but..

[the_other_one]

Why not just remove one lung at a time.
Put the first one back before removing the other one.
I am also nad.

Recovery from surgery after radiation

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It may not be that simple for the liver to recover from the surgery after radiotherapy. Radiotherapy reduces cell growth temporarily quite strongly. Also, modern radiotherapy with IMRT does not affect the critical organs that much.

If there are anything in radiotherapy that slashdot people should know it is IMRT. It is implemented by clever inverse calculation algorithms and quite fancy control equipment, and even better, is proven, provides better 5 year life quality, less complications, improved local control, etc.