“Getting It All” – Better Cancer Resections with FIRE™– Guided Surgery
The Promise
With modern diagnostic and imaging technologies, cancer can be detected earlier than ever before. And with earlier detection comes the promise of a surgical cure—that is, the complete removal (or resection) of all tumor tissue from a patient. Research has shown that patients with surgical cures have fewer complications in recovery and a greatly enhanced survival rate when compared to patients who do not achieve surgical cures.
The Reality
But between 16% and 86% of the time, depending on the tumor, surgical cures fail. Why?
One of the main reasons for this failure is that surgeons cannot see during surgery where tumor tissue ends and healthy tissue begins. Many tumors have cancerous tissue “seeds” that are invisible to the naked eye and which may invade tissue both close to and some distance from the main tumor mass. In many cases, these are overlooked because they are invisible and the patient may experience a recurrence of disease weeks or months after surgery.
The FIRE Future
Aktotome FIRE has the potential to dramatically improve cancer surgery, reducing the surgical cure failure rate by 90% or more for diseases like breast cancer.
You can think of FIRE as a probe that finds cancer. After removing the bulk of a tumor, the surgeon sprays a small amount of FIRE into the surgical cavity. If FIRE finds cancer, it fixes itself to the diseased cells and glows brightly in near infrared light, enabling the surgeon to clearly see, within minutes of applying FIRE, any cancer remaining in, or close to, the surgical cavity. He or she can then remove that tissue and, if necessary, apply FIRE again, to ensure no cancer remains.
FIRE lights up tumors, making them easy to see compared to normal tissue
FIRE from Akrotome Imaging – guiding surgeons to a surgical cure for cancer
- About Akrotome
- More about FIRE
- The technology behind FIRE
