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Neurosurgeons Use MRI-Guided Lasers To Destroy Tumors
breadboy21 writes "In the seemingly perpetual battle to rid this planet of cancer, a team of neurosurgeons from Washington University are using a new MRI-guided high-intensity laser probe to 'cook' brain tumors that would otherwise be completely inoperable. According to Dr. Eric C. Leuthardt, this procedure 'offers hope to certain patients who had few or no options before,' with the laser baking the cancer cells deep within the brain while leaving the good tissue around it unmarred. The best part, however, is that this is already moving beyond the laboratory, with a pair of doctors at Barnes-Jewish Hospital using it successfully on a patient last month. Regrettably, just three hospitals at the moment are equipped with the Monteris AutoLITT device, but if we know anything about anything related to lasers, it'll be everywhere in no time flat."
They totally misread the request by the Dr. Evil, he asked for sharks with lasers ON their heads, not humans with lasers IN their heads.
These scientists, always get some mundane detail like that wrong and totally spoil the scheme.
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OTOH this is freaking cool. How do they get the lasers only to burn the cancer cells and not burn tissue on the way to the cancer cells?
You can't handle the truth.
another big wow for stuff that's proving to kill folks in its' current form as well. not the magnets themselves, but the goop used to make one 'light up' for the pictures. personal experience speaking here.
You're right... this pointless war has gone on too long, let's just legalize cancer and be done with it.
want to welcome our new shark mounted, brain seeking, laser overlords.
It's a good thing that great advances are being made in very specialized areas of medicine. Meanwhile, the leading killer world-wide is still heart disease which receives disproportionately inadequate funding despite recent progress in PTCA stenting, etc. Machines like this may grab funding dollars and headlines, but they don't save very many lives.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Here the summary is a verbatim copy of TFA.
This is not cool.
this text is better in that it explains that first, a hole is drilled in the scull, then MRI is used to image the brain and these images help to insert a probe that's similar to a pencil in shape into the tumor through the brain, so it looks like this will go through other brain tissue first, and then this device discharges what basically amounts to heat and cooks the tumor.
You can't handle the truth.
There've been experimental uses of this kind of thing since the 1990s. The AutoLITT system mentioned in this mini-article, and Visualase are two commercial systems. There've been some preliminary clinical trials as well.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Cool. This sounds like a variant on the "Gamma Knife" technology I'd heard about years ago, where many beams of some sort (microwaves? x-rays?) are sent through the patients' head from different angles so as to deliver massive harm to one spot only.
Unfortunately, we're seeing an advance in health care just in time for it to be taken over.
Revive the Constitution.
We want to eradicate cancer, so what we do is fight it on a case by case basis, where we prolong the lives of those genetically predisposed to cancer and allow them to propagate that weak DNA down generations.
Seems to me the way to eradicate cancer is to allow natural selection to run its course and remove faulty DNA from the gene pool. It's too bad we're all too individually selfish to think of the greater implications of that selfishness.
Sounds like high school. Ridgemont High, to be specific.
Have gnu, will travel.
There is no doubt a genetic component to cancer but you can't jump from there to the kind of social processes you are implyimg without considering a lot of issues (including how our genes related to compassion towards each other may let us survive as a collective when individually we would all die).
As an example of that, here are two links to two compassionate people, Dr John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman, with advice that, used together, may prevent most cancers and even treat a few (by boosting the body's own immune system):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-cancer.html
Should we honor these two people for those contributions to humanity (including treating any early genetic diseases they might get) or should we just say, "tough luck, bad genes" if they do get sick somehow and let them die right outside of hospitals?
"Andy Bales- SiCKO: What Has Happened to Health Care?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC7zI7VXcCA
Besides, you've seen the movie "Gattaca", right? How long before people are designing their DNA? I'm not saying they will do a good job for it, though, and there may be other social and personal consequences too, like shown in that movie. :-( What nature tends to prize is disease resistance and hardiness more than almost anything else, although many people might opt for optimizing some things with unknown consequences. I'm just saying that idea of geen manipulation shows another problematical assumption you are making that the only way genetic material will get passed on is the old-fashioned way.
Memetic/cultural evolution is also happening at the level of "memes", as we see here on slashdot all the time, and quite rapidly, much faster than genetic evolution. But ask yourself, which of the memes you carry around in your head (including the one you just propagated) are more beneficial to your body as well as the communities that body is part of, and which are more parasitic or cancerous? And what does it take to have a healthy mental immune system?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's create a high energy tension wire which stops cancer... ?
Eric
...but if we know anything about anything related to lasers, it'll be everywhere in no time flat....
Good because I am already 29 months into a 12 month prognosis. My need was in 2008 like many others.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
this smells more like an add than an article.
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So what's left after surgery (and I'll guess, even with this laser thing) is a smaller tumor, which gets killed through radiation therapy (first/mostly) and also by chemotherapy. With brain tumors, the chemotherapy can sometimes be pill-based, which is good ... many
of the chemo horror stories you may have heard relate to intraveneous drug administration. Nausea, vomiting,
and so on are part of the picture to greater or lesser degrees. Less so with the pills.
It's not clear to me from the article(s) whether this laser treatment affects the radiation + chemo part of
therapy very much, like by shortening or eliminating it.
See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glioblastoma ... about one of the most common types of
brain tumor. (What Ted Kennedy and George Gershwin died of, for example.
The problem with these experimental treatments is that they start out with a lot of hype but never go anywhere due to flaws or cost. I don't see this coming to my nearby hospital any time soon.