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Science Technology

Out-of-Body Treatment For Liver Cancer 36

Posted by timothy from the just-like-pop-tops dept.
Tangential writes "This is amazing. Liver cancer, dangerous to treat and often deadly. Dosing that part of your body with enough radiation to cure the cancer often does as much harm as good. If they could just remove your liver, send it down to the lab to be treated and put it back in. An Italian MD has done just that." There's a story at New Scientist as well.
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Out-of-Body Treatment For Liver Cancer More

Out-of-Body Treatment For Liver Cancer

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  • This technique may work fine for the liver and a few other organs that are less vital (digestive organs for example). The article said the man was without his liver for only 11 minutes.. Surely this is the time that it was completely out of his body, and the time it was "disconnected" was much longer. Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed.
    • Good point, but RTFA (read the friendly article ;) ....
      An even dose of neutrons is needed to treat the entire organ so surgeons removed the liver in order not to risk the beam being deflected by bones or other parts of the body. "We could also use the boron therapy to treat the pancreas, the kidneys and lungs," Pinelli said.
      The lungs are mentioned specifically ... but I agree w/ the brain comment.
    • "Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed"

      Nonsense, I saw it done on Star Trek years ago!

      "Jim, where are you going to look in this whole galaxy?
      Where are you going to look for Spock's brain?"

      In radiology, down the hall and wrapped in sheet of Teflon.

    • Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed.

      Sure they can be. Reinstallation, however, is a bitch.

      Heart and lung transplants happen all the time. So not only can they take the lungs out of a person, they can put them back in a completely different person! In order to do the procedure on lungs, the doctors would first put the patient on a heart-lung machine ("We've secretly replaced his blood with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if he can tell the differece!"), which would give them a little, er, breathing room regarding time.

      The problem with doing brains is that it's still a problem to heal damage to central nervous system nerves.

      • "We've secretly replaced his blood with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if he can tell the differece!"

        I do that daily, only it's not a secret. (I'm seriously going to have to cut coffee, chocolate and tea out totally for a week or three after the holidays. Today I literally lived off two liters of coffee, several dozen chocolate covered espresso beans, a couple chocolate pieces, and a large Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. Damn network transplants - moving an ISP from two location to a third new location sucks.)

        --
        Evan "the bouncy"

    • > The article said the man was without his liver for only 11 minutes.. Surely this is the time that it was completely out of his body, and the time it was "disconnected" was much longer. Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed.

      Lungs: How 'bout hooking the guy up to a heart-lung machine and letting it oxygenate his blood for him?

      Brain: Bah, happens on /. every day.

  • Misleading article (Score:2, Informative)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    The reason they took out the liver is not to give it a bigger dose, it's so that the other structures in the body like bones don't reflect the radiation beams. With nothing in the way, the whole thing gets evenly done all the way around.

    And they are using the boron neutron capture technique thingy for this. I'm guessing that the boron atoms, which are absorbed more into the rapidly growing cancers, absorb the neutrons from the radiation stream going by.

    So what does it do then? Does the boron heat up when it absorbs a neutron, cooking the tumor but not the liver? Anyone who knows, clue me in.

    • Re:Misleading article (Score:4, Informative)

      by Merlin42 ( 148225 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @02:59PM (#4925094)
      FBFA (Read Both Friendly Articles ;) ... from the new scientist article ...

      The team has been working on the method since 1987 and has done extensive studies to work out the optimum dose. Two to four hours after the compound is given, a low-energy neutron beam is directed at the organ, splitting the boron into high-energy particles that mainly kill the cancer cells.

    • Re:Misleading article (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dannon ( 142147 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @02:59PM (#4925095) Journal
      Thanks for the clarification... but now I've got this weird mental image of the doctor removing the patient's liver and sticking it in a microwave, one with the rotating plate to make sure it's 'evenly done all the way around'.

      Minutes later: Ding!
      • Thanks for the clarification... but now I've got this weird mental image of the doctor removing the patient's liver and sticking it in a microwave, one with the rotating plate to make sure it's 'evenly done all the way around'.

        Minutes later: Ding!

        Now that you've said that, I'm having a flashback to South Park: BLU...

        I've got some bad news. We accidentally replaced your liver with a baked potato. You have about ten seconds left to live.

    • 10B + n -> 4He + 7Li + gamma

      Boron 10 captures a neutron and immediately fissions giving two energetic, but heay fragments, which dump their energy within a few microns of the capturs (usually in the same cell), typically killing the cell.
  • Just one question, what happens if they drop it?
    • The New Scientist article noted that they put the liver in a Teflon bag for the trip to the nuclear reactor.

      Just in case, it was a BUBBLEWRAP Teflon bag.

      In the future, they'll switch to Styrofoam packing peanuts to save money.
    • 5 second rule, unless the dog gets there first.

  • this sounds interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BigBir3d ( 454486 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @03:44PM (#4925360) Journal
    My father died of a cancer that sounds similar to what this guy had. Small tumors that spread over everything. Starts in the lung or liver, usually, and then spreads throughout all organs, eventually into the lymph system. Once in the lymph system, you are done.

    The beauty of this treatment is, it seems like such a simple idea. Why not take out the effected organ, if you can safely?

    What a difference six and a half years make...
    • The problem is if the tumour has already metastasized (spread to form new tumours in other locations) treatment is much more difficult. You can remove the affected lymph nodes and cut away visible tumours, but you're just buying time--there are microscopic tumours spread throughout the body that will gladly grow to replace their progenitors.

      If you can treat early while the disease is still confined to the liver (or lungs, or kidneys) then excellent--prognosis is good. The problem with lung cancer is that it usually isn't detected until the patient (usually a smoker) is quite ill. IIRC, liver tumours are also often not caught early. And cancers often don't start in the liver--tumours in the liver are often metastases from tumours elsewhere.

      Short of a marathon operation where doctors remove all of your internal organs for irradiation--then give the rest of your body a solid dose for good measure--metastatic cancer would be difficult to beat.

      Finally, the surgery is very much like an organ transplant--the liver is harvested from and delivered to the same patient. As noted in the article, such surgeries can be very traumatic for the recipient. The cure could be worse than the disease if the patient has already been weakened by other surgeries, chemotherapy, or radiation.

      That said, I don't mean to sound that pessimistic. One of the most difficult tasks in radiotherapy is planning dose delivery to ensure an even dose to a tumour volume that is mostly non-lethal to surrounding healthy tissue. Bones are a pain to deal with, and there are certain organs that just don't tolerate radiation well. (Too large a dose to the spinal cord causes paralysis, for example.) Being able to work with a bag of (pretty much) water would make treatment planning much easier. Treating the lungs is extremely difficult, because they're encased in bone (with the spinal cord up the back) and full of air...removing them and filling them with saline solution could make a world of difference in treatment of lung cancers.

  • ...I hope they introduce a good system for tracking whose liver is whose. I'd hate to get your liver put in me by mistake.
  • I have a great new operation the court could order convicted spammers to face. We could remove the brain from the body, subject it to a high dose of radiation, surgically insert a bullet into the amygdala, and then replace the brain back into the head. Scientists predict average IQ scores of spammers to increase by 100% with this technique, up to a total of 4 IQ points! Slightly smarter than a peanut.
  • It may not be that simple for the liver to recover from the surgery after radiotherapy. Radiotherapy reduces cell growth temporarily quite strongly. Also, modern radiotherapy with IMRT does not affect the critical organs that much.

    If there are anything in radiotherapy that slashdot people should know it is IMRT. It is implemented by clever inverse calculation algorithms and quite fancy control equipment, and even better, is proven, provides better 5 year life quality, less complications, improved local control, etc.

  • How do I know that I'll get my own liver back?

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