Stories about: Pathology

Is one look better than two? Assessing bone tumor removal during surgery

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Wordle graphic of words associated with bone tumor surgery and intraoperative assessment.
One assessment of tumor margins during bone tumor removal surgery may suffice where two are done now.
Improvements in imaging technologies have made the process of defining the extent of bone tumors like osteosarcomas increasingly accurate.

But while it’s easier than ever to say, “The tumor starts here and ends here,” when removing a bone tumor surgically, surgeons still need to take a moment during the operation to check the edges (or “margins”) of the removed and remaining bone for any signs of remaining tumor, a step called intraoperative assessment.

“You need to make sure the tumor has been completely removed and a safe amount of normal tissue remains as a buffer,” says Sara Vargas, MD, director of patient safety and quality in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Department of Pathology. “Achieving a margin that is free of tumor reduces a patient’s long-term risk of local tumor recurrence.”

During surgery, there are two ways to do the assessment, each method providing a check on the other: gross split specimen inspection and frozen section inspection.

The two methods, which are often done either simultaneously or in tandem during surgery, are quite different. …

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Mapping the wiring of the developing brain in 3D

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Ed. note: Last week we wrote about Jurriaan Peters, MD’s brain network analysis in children with autism. In the second of our two part series on brain mapping, we talk about ways of mapping the brain’s physical wiring.

(AMagill/Flickr)

At the most basic level, the brain is a collection of wires, albeit a really complex one.

But how during development do nerve fibers thread their way through the growing brain and make the right connections?

The answer to that question could reveal more about the nature of conditions like autism spectrum disorders—which, as we reported about a year and a half ago, seem to have their roots in structurally altered brain pathways.

“We know very little about what’s happening in the developing brain in three dimensions,” says Emi Takahashi, PhD, a researcher in the Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging & Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC) at Boston Children’s Hospital. “With histology techniques, we can achieve a two-dimensional view over small areas, but it’s hard to know which fiber bundles are growing in which ways during different stages of development in the whole brain.”

But new MRI-based technologies are quickly closing that knowledge gap, giving us our first high-resolution peek into how the developing brain wires itself up.

Using something called high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) MRI, Takahashi and her colleagues (including neuroradiologist and FNNDSC director P. Ellen Grant, MD) can trace the three-dimensional pathways within the growing brain via stunning images like these:

Courtesy Cerebral Cortex (Takahashi et al., 2012)

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