Near-Infrared Imaging Pinpoints Brain Tumors for Surgeons

"Night vision” goggles and beams of near-infrared (NIR) light may be able to detect tiny tumors and areas of cancerous tissue in the brain that surgeons can't normally see.

Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Dallas, USA) have developed a special kind of dye that can find its way to tumors inoculated in the brain. They choose a dye from an in vivo screening process that binds to many human tumors as well as gliomas, but not to normal tissue. Then, using a NIR camera developed by scientists at Texas A& M University (College Station, USA), they tested the ability of the dye to pick up tumors as they grew in laboratory mice. Light in the NIR wavelength spectrum easily penetrated the skulls of the animals to "excite” the dye, and the emitted fluorescent signal was then captured by a CCD (charged couple device) camera. The tumors shone with a brighter light than the normal brain tissue around them.

"No one can determine tumor margins in brain tissue adequately right now, but our hope is that the emerging technology of near-infrared fluorescence optical imaging will provide this crucial information in real time to surgeons, as an operation is under way,” said Shi Ke, M.D., an instructor in the department of experimental diagnostic imaging at M.D. Anderson.

Although neurosurgeons now use diagnostic scans to pinpoint where tumors are located prior to an operation, once the skull is open, soft brain matter can shift, making it difficult to know where tumor tissue ends.





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