AI technique helps neurosurgeons detect hidden cancer during brain tumor surgery

• Brain tumors can grow back from unseen cancer cells. 
• The new technique misses high-risk remaining tumors just 3.8% of the time, versus 24% for conventional methods. 
• These AI techniques could be used in surgeries for other cancers. 

When brain tumors recur, survival rates go down, and patients with the most lethal tumor type often die within a year. That's because cancerous tissue is left behind after the initial surgery, and it continues to grow, sometimes even faster than the original tumor.

The tool, which is open source and patented by UCSF, is known as FastGlioma, and has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

"FastGlioma has the potential to change the field of neurosurgery by immediately improving comprehensive management of patients with glioma," said senior author Todd Hollon, MD, of the Department of Neurosurgery at University of Michigan. "The technology works faster and more accurately than current standards of care methods for tumor detection and could be generalized to other pediatric and adult brain tumor diagnoses."

FastGlioma works by combining the predictive power of AI with stimulated Raman histology (SRH), an imaging technology that visualizes fresh tissue samples at the bedside within one-to-two minutes. This eliminates time-consuming processing and interpretation of tumor cells in pathology labs.

Source:

University of California - San Francisco

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