An imaging technique is safer and more effective in removing brain tumors

The result was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine on the 17th. Professor Li Xingde, who is in charge of research, told Xinhua News Agency: "In brain tumor craniotomy, how to remove the diseased tissue and try to retain healthy tissue as much as possible is a big problem for doctors. If the removal is not clean, it will easily recur. And the recurrence rate is very fast. Cut a little more, cut the normal tissue, the patient's normal functions such as speaking, limb and facial muscle movement may be affected. So there is no need for an intraoperative real-time navigation technology to tell the doctor how to cut ."

Optical coherence tomography is a new imaging technique developed in the 1990s. It was originally used for the diagnosis of fundus diseases. Its working principle is similar to medical ultrasound examination, but it is not the use of ultrasound, but the faster light waves.

In the past 4 years, the team led by Li Xingde and brain surgeon Alfredo Kinones-Hinojosa has been working hard to apply this technique to identify brain tumors, but the initial attempts to show brain tumor tissue and normal tissue There is no significant difference in imaging. They once wanted to give up, but later found that the images could be quantified based on optical parameters such as attenuation, scattering and absorption to successfully distinguish between brain tumors and normal tissues. Li Xingde said that this is like water and liquor, it looks the same, but when you smell it, you know that there is a big difference.

The researchers used ex vivo and live brain cancer mice surgically removed from brain cancer patients to test that the technique identified 92% of the tumor tissue and did not mistake normal tissue for tumor tissue. Li Xingde said that 92% is a very exciting data, and there is no good intraoperative navigation technology. The top American doctors can only recognize 50 in the intersection of tumor and healthy tissue with the existing technology and the naked eye. About about % of tumor tissue.

Currently, techniques for assisting in the diagnosis of tumors during surgery include ultrasound and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. Li Xingde said that the quantitative optical coherence tomography is fast, and hundreds of images can be produced in one second. The resolution is one to two orders of magnitude higher than that of ultrasound, and the instrument cost is estimated to be only about 5% of the NMR instrument.

The research team plans to use the technology to conduct clinical trials on patients this summer. Li Xingde believes that this technology has very intuitive navigation features. In the future, doctors should be able to cut the screen while looking at the screen and cut it more cleanly. "The cleaner the cut, the less likely it is that the brain cancer will recur, and the patient will live longer. In early brain cancer patients, this technique may cause brain cancer to not recur," he said.