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The Importance of Full Tumor Resection

Excluding all the cases in which a surgical intervention is not feasible (i.e. for tumor dissemination in various organs), the first goal of a cancer treatment is plainly the complete and precise resection of the lesion.

In fact, there is a strict correlation between patient survival and disease free time (D.F.T.) and the resection complete­ness. However, this mere concept becomes much less simple when applied to the real case of a surgical procedure.

Centuries of discoveries in nuclear physics have provided highly advanced imag­ing techniques, allowing precise individuation of lesions from outside the patient before the intervention. For example, a lung tumor is usually clearly showed by a CT scan (Computed Tomography), while NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) provides sharp images of brain or liver cancers. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is able to give functional imaging as well, giving informations about methabolism of both healthy and diseased tissue. These techniques are usually able to provide a spatial resolution of the order of few millimeters (in case of CT and NMR, several mm in case of PET), as evident from Fig.1.1.

However, this remarkable amount of information available before surgery in some way cease to be much useful during the operation itself. In fact, an area that showed in the PET a particularly high metabolic activity, thus suggesting the presence of a lesion or for example a diseased lymph node, may be too poorly identified by the imaging to make it easy to the surgeon to find during surgery. Similarly, a brain lesion clearly delineated by NMR can be difficult to localize after craniotomy, and © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 1

F. Collamati, An Intraoperative Beta-Probe for Cancer Surgery,

Springer Theses, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33699-2_1

Fig. 1.1 Examples of CT (a), NMR (b) and PET (c) scan images

its borders difficult to discriminate due to possible little visual difference between normal and tumoral tissue.

The translation of pre-operative imaging informations in the surgical field is a critical point to optimize both the use of these valuable data and the effectiveness of the intervention. Hence, such a crucial topic has been addressed with several instruments and techniques.

1.1.1

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Scientific source Francesco Collamati. An Intraoperative Beta-Probe for Cancer Surgery. Springer Theses Recognizing Outstanding Ph.D. Research. 2016

Other medical related information The Importance of Full Tumor Resection:

  1. Contents
  2. The Importance of Full Tumor Resection
  3. Chapter 4 Medical Applications