The Surgeon

After his first weight-loss surgery three years ago, Paul Martin considered getting a tattoo designed around the four small surgical scars on his side—say, a golf green.

After a second weight-loss surgery in December, Martin didn’t have any new scars to add to the design. “I woke up with just a slight sore throat,” he says about the procedure, which took about two hours. “There wasn’t any pain because there weren’t any incisions.”

Martin, 53 years old, is among the first patients at Stanford Hospital & Clinics to be treated using what is called natural orifice surgery. In his case, the entire surgery was performed through his throat.

“We went down his throat with a device that looks like a regular endoscope, with a ‘duckbill’ on the end,” the surgeon, John Morton, MD, said. “In the duckbill is a tiny instrument like a sewing machine, with a needle that has plastic sutures.”

Morton, who is also associate professor of surgery, stitched pleats in the stoma, the opening between the patient’s intestine and the small pouch that had been created in the earlier surgery. He then tightened the pleats around the endoscope, reducing the stoma from 20 millimeters to 14, helping to control the amount of food Martin could digest.
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Studies prove that mammography saves lives. The screening tool can detect breast cancer early when it’s still curable. But for the thousands of women with dense breast tissue, mammography is not enough. These women may need additional screening tests such as MRI‘s. Now, researchers at Mayo Clinic have developed new technology that can spot breast tumors in dense tissue at a fraction of the cost of MRI’s.

Research proves that screening for breast cancer with mammograms saves lives. But mammograms are not perfect. They can miss tumors, especially in women with dense breast tissue. That’s why Doctors at Mayo Clinic also use MRI’s to screen for breast cancer in high risk women. The technology can detect some tumors that mammograms cannot.

Watch an animation of a virtual colonoscopy showing a 9-mm polyp protruding into the colonic lumen. Animation courtesy of the Radiological Society of America.

A new study shows that an imaging technology developed by Mayo Clinic researchers can identify liver fibrosis with high accuracy and help eliminate the need for liver biopsies. Liver fibrosis is a common condition that can lead to incurable cirrhosis if not treated in time.

The technology, called magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), produces color-coded images known as elastograms that indicate how internal organs, muscles and tissues would feel to the touch. Red is the stiffest; purple, the softest. Other imaging techniques do not provide this information.
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The determination of the precise anatomical location of a tumor is the prerequisite for setting optimal parameters for radiation treatment of prostate cancer. This approach guarantees that the ionizing radiation only destroys tumorous cells and does not affect other organs in the vicinity of the prostate.

In a cooperative study with Innsbruck Medical University and the East-Vienna Center of Social Medicine, two physicists of Vienna University of Technology (TU), evaluated the mean deviation of radiation parameters for prostate cancers and compared various sources of radiation.
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Scientists from the University of Alcalá (UAH) have designed a prosthesis made of silicon and polypropylene shaped like an “upside down T” that substantially reduces cases of incisional hernias.

A hernia is produced when the content of the abdominal cavity protrudes through a weakened natural orifice of the abdominal wall such as the inguinal canal, the umbilical area, the epigastrium or a previous incision in the abdomen such as from a surgical operation. The hernia manifests itself as a bulging lump since the internal lining of the abdomen protrudes in what is called a hernial sac that shrinks or grows depending on the effort exerted by the affected individual.
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Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized “nanoworms” that can cruise through the bloodstream without significant interference from the body’s immune defense system and—like tiny anti-cancer missiles—home in on tumors.

Their discovery, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Advanced Materials, is reminiscent of the 1966 science fiction movie, the Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine is shrunken to microscopic dimensions, then injected into the bloodstream to remove a blood clot from a diplomat’s brain.
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A specially coated metal tube, no larger than a cigarette, could be the key to developing an artificial pancreas to help millions of people with diabetes avoid insulin injections, according to an article scheduled for the May 5 issue of Chemical & Engineering News.

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No simple blood test exists to determine which of the millions of people infected with hepatitis C virus will develop cirrhosis of the liver or cancer. Now, researchers are developing new technology to find blood proteins that herald the earliest signs of chronic liver disease. If successful, they hope to extend the use of the technology, and to do the same for many other diseases and to make it commercially available for broad clinical use.
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