Patient Wears 3-D Glasses During Surgery for Brain Cancer

A patient in France was conscious during brain surgery and wore 3D glasses as doctors removed a cancerous tumor.

"In creating a completely artificial world for the patient, we could map certain zones and connections of his brain related to functions that we could not, up to now, easily test on the operating table," Philippe Menei, a neurosurgeon at Angers hospital in western France.

About Brain Tumor
Brain tumors are the abnormal growth of brain cells that may be benign or metastatic. Brain tumors account for about 2.4% of all the tumor diagnosesandare most challenging due to their critically delicate location.

‘World's first attempt to use a virtual environment during brain surgery has been successful as the doctors were able to test the patient's senses during the surgery.’

Tweet it Now

The operation was performed on January 27, and the patient was recovering well, he said.

Taking a scalpel to the brain while a patient is conscious has been a common practice for more than a decade.

Doing so allows doctors to determine, during an operation, whether and how vital functions such as speech, vision and movement are affected.

Head Injury | Brain Injury Overview Types Causes Symptoms Diagnosis Treatment
Head injury or traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of disability among children and young adults that leads to varying degrees of physical and mental stability. Fortunately, it is also one of the preventable brain disorder.

Patients cannot feel the probing of their brain tissue, and do not experience pain.

But using three-dimensional, virtual reality opens up a whole new range of possibilities, Menei said.

Decreased Consciousness - Symptom Evaluation
Consciousness can be decreased to various degrees and result in conditions like delirium, stupor, coma, persistent vegetative state, minimal conscious state and brain death.

"By totally controlling what the patient sees and hears, we can put him in situations that allow us to do tests on certain (neural) connections that were not possible before," he said.

In this case, it was crucial to protect the patient's vision because he had already lost sight in one eye due to an illness.

Brain Exercises to Improve Memory
An active brain can certainly help in improving memory by strengthening the connections between neural impulses in brain.

During the operation, the medical team created a neutral virtual environment with no single point of focus.

"In this empty void, we could control the space and make luminous objects appear in the patient's peripheral vision," Menei said.

Three weeks after the operation, the patient's vision was intact despite the removal of an aggressive tumor in a region controlling sight.

Menei said the patient was now preparing to undergo chemotherapy.

Virtual reality glasses "open the way to greater precision, and allow us to envision procedures that were not possible up to now, such as the removal of otherwise inaccessible brain tumors," he said.

His team plans to use the technique again in the coming months on patients with brain tumors situated near areas that control vision.

Virtual reality glasses could also be adapted for children, and may be tested on young patients before the end of the year.

Brain cancer is the second most common form of cancer among children in France.

Source-AFP