Featured series 
Tag: surgical techniques
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Health
Video game technology may help surgeons operate on beating hearts
Surgery has been done inside some adults’ hearts while the heart is still beating, avoiding the need to open the chest, stop the heart and put patients on cardiopulmonary bypass. But to perform intricate beating-heart operations in babies with congenital heart disease or do beating-heart complex repairs in adults, surgeons need fast, highly sophisticated real-time…
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Health
CT significantly reduces the need for appendectomy
For the study, the researchers analyzed 663 patients who were examined on CT for suspected appendicitis. An appendectomy was performed on 268 of the CT-screened patients. Of these 268 patients, only eight had a negative appendectomy. “Prior to CT, the negative appendectomy rate was 20 percent, because there was no way to be sure whether…
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Campus & Community
Surgery done on a single cell
A superprecise scalpel that can be used to operate on an individual cell is now a reality thanks to experimenters at Harvard University. “Ultrashort laser pulses [up to 1,000 a second] produce a spot as hot as the sun,” notes Eric Mazur, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics. “Normally, that kind of heat would vaporize…
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Health
New drug combination may prevent dangerous complication of bone marrow transplantation
An ongoing clinical study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists suggests that a three-drug therapy, which includes a novel medication called sirolimus, reduces graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) in stem cell transplant patients more effectively and with less toxicity than traditional treatments. The study seeks to produce better outcomes for patients receiving stem cell transplants for diseases such…
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Health
New radio wave treatment corrects back disorders
Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are using radio waves –- the same energy that sends signals to your car radio -– to gently dissolve small amounts of unwanted disc tissue and relieve the pressure often associated with lower back and upper leg pain. Virtually bloodless and exceptionally precise, nucleoplasty radio wave injection is…
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Health
Minimally invasive surgical procedure offers limited benefits for colon cancer patients
A national clinical trial compared the effects of standard colon cancer surgery with a newer, minimally invasive procedure for removing tumors called laparoscopic surgery. Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic and their colleagues found that compared with patients who had the standard operation, those who had the minimally invasive surgery were able…
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Health
Surgery without scalpels
Paul Simmons, a 29-year-old Maine farmer, suffered from a lung tumor. In February 2001, at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a probe containing a long needle was inserted into his chest and guided to the tumor by a scanning device. As Eric vanSonnenberg and his colleagues did the procedure, they could watch on…
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Health
Sights set on partial corneal transplants
“We don’t have any way of curing these problems,” says Nancy Joyce, a Harvard researcher who is working on saving people’s sight when their corneas deteriorate. “The only way right now is full corneal transplantation, healthy tissue and all. In our work, we’re trying to facilitate replacement of the diseased tissue only.” To do that,…