PARIS:
In a ground-breaking advance, French neurosurgeons on Friday said they had
successfully treated brain tumours through ultra-keyhole surgery, using a tiny
fiberoptic laser to destroy cancerous
cells.
Alexandre Carpentier of
the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris said the work was "a world-first" in
its use of multiple advanced techniques and of local anaesthesia rather than
general sedation.
So far, eight
volunteers have been treated in the pilot programme, launched December 2006,
Carpentier said.
"They were
hurt from metastasing brain tumours caused by various cancers, mainly lung
and breast cancer that failed to respond to conventional treatment and were
otherwise inoperable," he
said.
Doctors had given the
volunteers only if three months left to live, on
average.
Under the pioneering
technique, a minute hole three millimetres (0.12 of an inch) wide-eyed was drilled
into the skull, allowing the operating surgeon to precede a water-cooled fibre-optic
laser into the brain.
The
surgery became possible because of a revolutionary American-designed optical maser that
is permanently chilled to forfend causing parentage clots on contact with the brain or
epileptic fits.
The device was
gently guided towards the tumour surface area with the help of a magnetic resonance
imagination (MRI) scanner. Every trey seconds, a computer workstation calculated
the temperature at the surface area being burnt-out by the laser to ensure that there was
no life-threatening overheating and to confirm that only tumorous cells were organism
destroyed.
The patient standard
only a local anesthetic, remaining conscious in order to be able to speak to
the medical team to help verify that cerebral functions were not being harmed.
However, "the patients feels nothing during the operation and mostly can
depart hospital 14 hours later, the eve or the morning after the operation,"
the surgeon said. The results are "conclusive," said
Carpentier.
Treating the
patients completely requires two or more than bouts of surgery, and there had been no
cases of cerebral bruising or epilepsy. So far, six of the eight have completed
the broad programme. Of the sixer, five receive not had a relapse�a return of
cancerous cells to the brain�at a nine-month monitoring
point.
"This is the first time
that laser technology has been used intracranially, meaning inside an enclosed
skull, using MRI in real time to avoid collateral damage," aforementioned Carpentier.
"This is the predecessor of future techniques in which MRI will dally a magnetic core
intervention purpose in neurosurgery."
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