Merging Of Medical Technologies

[belovelife]

i was wondering, is there an issue of installing a gamma knife and a mri machine?

 

 

therefore making it cheaper and more availible to patients who need it, and make it more availible to those with specific insurance issues?

[CraigD]

i was wondering, is there an issue of installing a gamma knife and a mri machine?

 

therefore making it cheaper and more availible to patients who need it, and make it more availible to those with specific insurance issues?

I'm pretty certain this is a bad idea. :(

 

MRI scanners and directed radiation radiosurgery machines like the Gamma Knife have hardly any components in common. A commercial MRI scanner consist of very strong electromagnets and electric coils that both create a specific, radio-frequency signal, and detect changes in the current in those coils induced by changes in the orientation of the hydrogen atoms in the water in the patient’s body to form an image of it. Gamma Knife or similar machines consist of arrays of shielded tubes with high-frequency (hence the “gamma” in this trademarked name) radiation sources, either from a container of a radioactive material like cobalt-60, or emitted by beams of accelerated protons striking a non-radioative target made of a material like tungsten.

 

To combine an MRI and a radiosurgery machine, you’d need all the parts and support systems of both machines, with the added complexity of combining them so that both work without interfering with one another. I’m fairly sure that, if this could be made to work at all, the resulting machine wouldn’t work as well as an existing commercial MRI and a radiosurgery machine, and would cost more than the two combined. The only savings in combining the two would be not having two separate physical cases and procedure rooms, the least expensive parts of these systems, and even that slight saving would be negated, because the single machine and room could only treat about half as many patients in a working day.

[belovelife]

but would it work?

 

you would have much better accuracy using tha gamma knife with real time update of the tumor being removed

 

(and or nueral connections that induce some type of seisures)

[belovelife]

as far as i knew, this process was done with an emmiter and a filter

 

berrilium, indium, telluride

 

i think, ( forgive me if i get the elements wrong)

one, when excited with electricity, emitts a spectrum, and the other, only allows one spectrum through

 

and then one half the wavelength

 

again, pleace correct me if i'm wrong

 

 

but if a layer <= 1 cm, was formed in the same 10,000 emmiter level, then it should be easily integrated into the mri

[belovelife]

hmmm

 

it should be possible

[CraigD]

as far as i knew, this process was done with an emmiter and a filter

 

berrilium, indium, telluride

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Gamma Knife radiosurgery machine uses radioactive cobalt-60, with shielded “beam channels” to direct many beams to focus on a small point in the patient’s brain. See and this wikipedia section for a short description, and this diagram, from this paper, for a more accurate diagram of the machine.

 

you would have much better accuracy using tha gamma knife with real time update of the tumor being removed

I don’t think so.

 

Gamma Knife and other radiosurgery machines don’t actually remove tumors the way surgical excision does. They damage target cells so much that the cells die. It takes a while – on the order of days – for the immune and circulatory system to remove the dead cells enough that imaging devices can see the effect.

 

Also, when removing tumors surgically or radiologically, one intentionally removes a “margin” outside of the imaged tumor, to assure that undetected bits of the tumor don’t survive. It’s a somewhat messy, imprecise medical art.

 

I’ve only read about a proposed device that combines imaging and surgery into a single machine – one that emits precisely directed antimatter beams – in a single source, Robert Forward’s 1995 Indistinguishable from Magic. As speculative biomedical technology writing, or science writing in general, I consider this part of Forward’s book very obscure – I’ve not met a single clinician or medical technologist who’s heard of it, and have found no reference to it on the internet. IMHO, this book is under-appreciated, and well worth reading (it’t US$4 for a full un-DRMed multiformat download from its publisher, Baen).

 

At low intensities, Forward’s proposed device produce showers of annihilation products that allow detectors to precisely image the target tissue with molecule-sized resolution while annihilating only a small number of atoms in it. At high intensities, it annihilates on the order of trillions of atoms, completely removing target tissues.