Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...carefully a surgeon cuts out a malignant tumor, the few stray cancer cells that are inevitably left behind will begin to grow again. TGF-beta and dendritic cells, or any one of a dozen other treatments under investigation by Black and others, could lead to the true cure for brain cancer that is Black's long-term goal...
...Black is determined to do his absolute best with the tools at hand, using creative surgical techniques to get at cancers once considered all but intractable. For example, clival chordomas, deadly tumors that grow at the base of the skull, could be reached only by cutting through the entire brain, which left patients devastated. As one of the pioneers of skull-base surgery, Black now removes clival chordomas by going up through the nasal passage, bypassing the brain entirely. His patients go home without any loss of function (known to doctors as a "deficit...
...techniques are like two sides of a coin. In the first, Black applies a mild electric current to a part of the body--the wrist, for example--and then touches electrodes to exposed brain areas. It is like an electrician testing a circuit: wherever he picks up current, he knows he has a live connection, indicating that the tumor is entwined with eloquent brain and cannot just be cut out. Otherwise, he is touching inert tumor tissue. Conversely, with direct stimulation, Black applies the current to the tumor and sees if the body twitches in response...
...tools have revolutionized neurosurgery but, just as in his lab work, Black keeps pushing to improve them. He is advising a student, for example, on a project aimed at essentially bringing functional MRI into the operating room in real time. This would permit a surgeon to re-image the brain constantly during surgery in order to observe the changing geography of the brain as the operation progresses. Black is also seeking advances in noninvasive surgery, used when a tumor is so deeply embedded in eloquent tissue that it cannot be cut out. Surgeons now use focused beams of X rays...
...enemy, and backed up by new therapies like TGF-beta antisense to hunt down straggler cells, Black believes the audacious course he set for himself in medical school may be attainable. Along with other top neurosurgeons, he may yet find a way to defeat--not just hold off--malignant brain tumors...