A helping hand for cancer detection

Pioneering procedure

Touted to be the first of its kind in the State, the device is indigenously developed. Speaking to Deccan Herald, Senior Consultant Dr T Mukuntharajan said that earlier in order to extract tissues the manual way, doctors had to first locate the lesions inside the body.

Citing an example, he said that if a person has lung cancer, then using a CT scan, doctors first locate the area of the cancer.

Then a ‘Tree Cut needle’ is injected into the body of the patient to extract the tissue. In order to check if the needle is on the cancerous tissue, a CT scan has to be done again.
This process continues until the tissue affected with cancer is extracted from the body of the patient, during which the patient is repeatedly exposed to radiation.

Using the ‘Piga CT Workflow’ allows the image from CT scan machine to be transferred to the robotic arm. The depth of insertion into the body of the patient is also given to the machine.

Once doctors identify the cancerous tissue, local anaesthesia is administered to the patient.
This is followed by the ‘Tree Cut needle’ being used to extract the tissue.

Describing the advantages of the machine, Dr Mukuntharajan said that exposure to radiation reduces drastically when the ‘Piga CT Workflow’ is used.  Another important feature is that tissues from lesions as small as one or two centimetres can also be extracted. Due to this technique, damage to blood vessels is also reduced, he added.
He mentioned that the smallest lesion from which he was able to extract tissue was 0.8 cm wide.