Travis Stork: 52-year-old Su (ph) had a brain tumor; she went to see Dr. Neil Martin at UCLA Medical Center where he operated on her in one of the most hi-tech ORs I have ever seen.
Dr. Neil Martin: Today's surgery is intended to remove a tumor just behind the right ear. What's unique about this room is the Image Guidance System, the GPS system.
So what we have here, we can see the tumor, we are taking a look at this with what amounts to 3D x-ray vision, we can see right through the scalp and skull.
In the past, everything was two-dimensional black-and-white images; the CT scans, the MRI scans, chest x-rays. Now using digital technologies, you can see the underlying brain and tumor and blood vessels clearly.
This is an interactive touch panel and I can scroll through the image, I can magnify it and minimize it. We can look at individual cuts and take a look at the tumor on the full-screen view.
So it's almost as if you can hold the anatomy in your hand. So we will just open the scalp up now and we are going to separate the scalp and the muscle, so that we can make our opening in the bone in the right spot, and right on top of the tumor here.
This is exactly this patient's anatomy. We can see the tumor outlined, and we can see its relationship to all the blood vessels in the neighborhood of the tumor.
So we are going to use an electric drill to open up the bone, and try to come right down on top without getting any bleeding. So we can see in the upper right-hand corner, the back edge of where we are going in. Tumor is just coming into view there. So this is the edge of the tumor right here.
Through this very small opening, which is less than an inch, we can remove this tumor with very little contact with a normal brain tissue. You can see the tip of the probe where the cross hairs intersect and that shows me where I am inside the tumor, and now we are just going to separate it up and it looks like it's completely free and we are ready to have it out. There it is.
What I find is, if I can visualize the whole operation before I do it, then the operation almost invariably goes very well, and this kind of imaging really helps me do that.
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