3-D technology takes guess work out of brain surgery.
3-D technology takes guess work out of brain surgery.
May 25, 2000 -- Every day for eight months Gisela Roubeck lived with pounding pain behind her temples. Every day she reached for the bottle of ibuprofen and hoped for some relief. Relief came on Jan. 25, 2000, when neurosurgeon Ezriel F. Kornel, MD, guided by special 3-D images of her brain carefully removed a benign tumor through an incision about the width of a half-dollar.
"I went home the next day. No headaches. Dr. Kornel is my miracle," says Roubeck, 32. "The surgery was on a Tuesday, I was back at work the following Monday."
Not science fiction and certainly not a miracle. What Roubeck describes was the first image-guided brain surgery using on the spot CAT scan images. Kornel, director of the Institute for Neurosciences at Northern Westchester Hospital Center, says the new approach adds a precision that was previously unknown in brain surgery. The center, in Mt. Kisco, New York, is developing an image-guided program in conjunction with Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School.
This latest high-tech improvement requires specially constructed operating rooms as well as a combination of several high-tech approaches, says Kornel. A portable CAT scan is placed at the end of a specially designed operating table.
Because operating tables are steel, they won?t allow the CAT scan beams to penetrate the table, Kornel says. So researchers had to design an operating table that would let the beams through, he tells WebMD. The patient is scanned before surgery and the images are fed into a computerized navigational system that then displays 3-D images of the area scanned.
The navigational system, called a Stealth System, "plots" the area for the special microscope used by brain surgeons. The scope then "actually becomes a pointer, precisely directing the instruments," he says. "During surgery we can repeat the scan by simply rolling the patient into the scanner and then feeding the images into the navigational system," he says.
At University Hospitals of Cleveland, neurosurgeons are using a different system, one that uses MRI pictures, to guide their surgeries, but they have not yet integrated these images with the navigational system, Robert Ratcheson, MD, chief of neurosurgery at University Hospitals tells WebMD.
"I went home the next day. No headaches. Dr. Kornel is my miracle," says Roubeck, 32. "The surgery was on a Tuesday, I was back at work the following Monday."
Not science fiction and certainly not a miracle. What Roubeck describes was the first image-guided brain surgery using on the spot CAT scan images. Kornel, director of the Institute for Neurosciences at Northern Westchester Hospital Center, says the new approach adds a precision that was previously unknown in brain surgery. The center, in Mt. Kisco, New York, is developing an image-guided program in conjunction with Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School.
This latest high-tech improvement requires specially constructed operating rooms as well as a combination of several high-tech approaches, says Kornel. A portable CAT scan is placed at the end of a specially designed operating table.
Because operating tables are steel, they won?t allow the CAT scan beams to penetrate the table, Kornel says. So researchers had to design an operating table that would let the beams through, he tells WebMD. The patient is scanned before surgery and the images are fed into a computerized navigational system that then displays 3-D images of the area scanned.
The navigational system, called a Stealth System, "plots" the area for the special microscope used by brain surgeons. The scope then "actually becomes a pointer, precisely directing the instruments," he says. "During surgery we can repeat the scan by simply rolling the patient into the scanner and then feeding the images into the navigational system," he says.
At University Hospitals of Cleveland, neurosurgeons are using a different system, one that uses MRI pictures, to guide their surgeries, but they have not yet integrated these images with the navigational system, Robert Ratcheson, MD, chief of neurosurgery at University Hospitals tells WebMD.
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