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Balloon Helps Doctor Reach Brain Tumor
Anml4ixoye writes "A neurosurgeon at Cincinnati Children's Hospital has succesfully completed removal of a tumor in an previously thought inoperable part of the brain. The doctor, Kerry Crone expanded a balloon at the end of a cathader to push the neurons aside and remove the tumor, which was located at the thalamus. CNN is also running the story."
...how long it'll take Richard Branson to express annoyance that he hasn't taken a balloon there yet.
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
I am going to STRANGLE (Seriously Terribly Restrict Airflow 'N Get Lungs Exploding) the person who comes up with these witty acronyms. I'm pretty sure it's just one guy in some corner office.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
catheter, n. a hollow flexible tube for insertion into a body cavity, duct, or vessel to allow the passage of fluids or distend a passageway. Uses include the drainage of urine from the bladder through the urethra or insertion through a blood vessel into the heart for diagnostic purposes.
For further meanings, see here.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Before now, these operations could only be done by miniaturizing a small submarine and 5-person crew and injecting them into the bloodstream, so that they could reach the clot and destroy it with a miniaturized industrial laser. This was an extremely expensive operation, and risky due to the fact that the miniaturization only lasted an hour.
It's rather sad that this brilliant breakthrough in neural surgery has generated such a lackluster response on this forum. Absolutely no sense of acknowledgement of what a completely righteous hack this is to deal with a rather fatal problem.
Quick, someone bring SCO up, I'm sure we can break the comments on this article up to at least low single digits instead of the twenty odd present.
..the doctor.. let him save many more children!
:)
God bless that kid.
Katherin
-Indian Programmer
This is similar to a technique that is used to create more skin for grafting in burn victims: a balloon is implanted underneath the scalp of the pediatric burn victim and is gradually inflated over time. The skin and subdermal tissues are stretched slowly and expand in size, much like the abdomen as we eat too much over the years.
After a month or so, you've got about two-thirds of a sphere of diameter of 8 cm, yielding maybe 128 cm^2 of usable skin for grafting onto the burn victim.
This is a great technique. The trick in surgery is not only taking out what doesn't belong there (the tumor) but leaving intact everything else which does belong there. The slow dissection into the brain teasing apart the structures without damaging them or putting too much pressure on them (which can also damage them by decreasing the blood flow into the area, and hypoxia for greater than a minute can be permanently damaging to neural tissue) or opening up vessels. Creating a tract and then allowing gradual pressure over a long period of time to separate the fascial (I know it's not really fascial, but the equivalent of it) planes seems like a great way to avoid damage. What the article doesn't address is how long a time period this takes place over (as I end this convoluted sentence a preposition with).