PARIS—Mauna Kea Technologies, an endomicroscopy company and developer of cancer-viewing Cellvizio imaging, recently announced the expansion of its program to investigate surgical applications of the technology. The company is collaborating with professor Guy-Bernard Cadière, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the Saint Pierre University Hospital in Brussels, on the first large-scale clinical trial of an optical biopsy modality in surgery.
"Having access to cellular-level views that amount to real-time pathology during surgery could have an enormous impact on patient outcomes and overall healthcare costs," said Prof. Cadière, chief of gastrointestinal surgery at Saint Pierre University Hospital.
"When removing cancerous tumors from any location in the body, the primary goal for a surgeon is to completely eliminate all the malignant tissue, but this can be difficult without a clear view of cellular structures," he added. "So, we often remove excess surrounding tissue to overcompensate. As gastroenterologists have been doing for years, we expect to be able to examine the margins around tumors to ensure that we've removed all the dangerous tissue, while preserving as much healthy tissue as possible to help improve the patient's survival and quality of life following surgery."
According to Mauna Kea, Prof. Cadière is a pioneer of advanced laparoscopic procedures, including the laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication, a treatment for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). In 1997, he and his team were the first in the world to perform robotic surgery and he led the world's first laparoscopic bariatric surgery in 1992.
