Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/100670
PHOTO �� SMITHBERGER PHOTOGRAPHY, NORTH CANTON SPeCIaL Feature David M. Isaacs, DO, is a board-certified diagnostic radiologist who recently introduced small particle technology called SIR-Spheres to patients with cancer of the liver at Akron General Medical Center. SIR-Spheres can stop tumor progression, shrink tumors and help prolong the patient���s life by one to two years. 26 | Cleveland/Akron/Canton MD News ��� MDNEWS.COM ��� JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2013 rest of the anatomy, which makes surgery difficult,��� says Dr. Lowe. ���As a surgeon, my goal is to be precise ... to minimize bleeding and ensure good margins (at the site where the tumor is removed). The more blood that���s lost, the more liver that���s resected, the longer the hospital stay. So precision is important.��� PTI is a developer of innovative surgical navigation products for soft tissue organs to improve surgical precision. In February 2010, it received FDA clearance for a medical technology system to plan liver surgery using preoperative medical images and to more precisely navigate the targeted surgical site during surgery. The PTI technology and software system uses state-of-the-art line of sight localization and surface registration techniques to show surgeons where they are in the context of their target organ and surrounding anatomical structures. It allows surgeons to ���see through��� the organ they are operating on by registering the surgical instrument in three-dimensional (3-D) space onto the patient���s preoperative medical images. ���The benefit of this system is that you can clearly identify the anatomy in the 3-D image and then are able to individualize your surgery for that patient���s anatomy with respect to the tumor and the blood vessels in the liver,��� says Dr. Lowe. ���So, in general, it saves liver and makes the surgery safer, and hopefully that translates to better outcomes.��� As an example, he relates the case of a 65-year-old female patient who presented with metastasis from breast cancer in her liver. One of those metastases was very near a major blood vessel (the right portal vein) in the liver. ���We did a contrasted CT, from which a very detailed 3-D image of the patient���s liver anatomy ��� including the surfaces of the liver and all of the vasculature