CBS news ran a feature story on "Iron Oxide Nanoparticles" for brain tumors on the evenings news. Did anyone catch it not sure if they mentioned the Dr. or Hospital as I was on the computer at the time. These are the dots that make me believe AVM is involved.
Notice Dr. Mukesh Harisinghani!!!
New MRI Detects Tiniest Of Tumors
BOSTON, June 18, 2003
(Photo: AP/CBS)
"Even if it only works this well for prostate cancer, it's a significant advance."
Dr. Jeffrey Brown, radiologist
(AP) An enhanced type of MRI can detect much smaller tumors than ever before — some tinier than a pea — in an advance that could open a new age in diagnosing cancer without surgery, researchers say.
The experimental technique examines the lymph nodes for signs of spreading cancer.
Doctors already routinely use magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to check the lymph nodes to see whether cancer that originated somewhere else in the body — say, in the breast or the prostate gland — is spreading. But the enhanced technique proved superior to conventional MRIs when tested with cancer that had spread from the prostate.
The leader of the research, Dr. Mukesh Harisinghani, said his team has also had preliminary success using the approach to detect the spread of breast, testicular, bladder and kidney cancer.
In the prostate study, the technique found 63 cancerous lymph nodes in 33 patients. Conventional MRI would have missed 71 percent of the nodes, and the spreading cancer would have gone undetected in nine patients.
"Even if it only works this well for prostate cancer, it's a significant advance," said Dr. Jeffrey Brown, a radiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Earlier detection of spreading prostate cancer would allow more aggressive treatment sooner, help doctors track the response, and spare some patients unnecessary removal of the prostate gland or lymph nodes. About 200,000 prostate cancer cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and 32,000 people die from it.
The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to approve the new technique. It is unclear when the FDA might decide.
Dr. Samuel Wickline, who studies imaging at Washington University, said this method and others like it will eventually "allow us to diagnose things that you can't even see with any imaging" now in use.
The study, funded partly by the National Cancer Institute, was carried out by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The findings appear in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
The method relies on minuscule magnetic particles, known as nanoparticles, to enhance an MRI. Acting like a television's contrast dial, the injected particles collect in the immune system's lymph nodes and create a clearer separation between dark and light areas in the image.
