Tag Archives: mri

Tumor-analysis technology enables speedier treatment decisions for bowel cancer patients

A novel medical-imaging technology, TexRAD, which analyses the texture of tumors, has been shown in trials to enable early diagnosis of those bowel-cancer patients not responding to the standard cancer therapy better than other available tumor markers. Furthermore, the TexRAD markers showed the ability to assess at an early stage the likelihood of survival, distinguishing patients who will have a good prognosis from those having poor prognosis. Dr Balaji Ganeshan, one of the Sussex academics whose research led to the development of the technology, said: “By using TexRAD to scan for subtle anomalies in a tumor’s texture, researchers have been able to spot more quickly when treatments are — or are not — working and adjust treatment accordingly. “And because TexRAD simply provides an additional layer of software analysis of the MRI and CT scans that already exist as part of routine clinical practice, it is non-invasive from the patient’s point of view and potentially cost-effective to the healthcare provider.” The technology is being evaluated in a number of research institutions and university hospitals around the world. …

New hope for potential prostate cancer patients

The only place in the Southeast offering the MRI-US image fusion technique is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Program for Personalized Prostate Cancer Care. It is estimated that 2014 will see more than 240,000 new cases of prostate cancer, and more than 29,000 deaths from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute. Jeffrey Nix, M.D., along with colleague Soroush Rais-Bahrami, M.D., both assistant professors in the UAB Department of Urology, studied the MRI-US image fusion as fellows at the NCI. Nix and Rais-Bahrami are two of a select few urologists in the United States trained to utilize this technology; together they have five years’ experience using this approach. …

Most prostate cancer patients surveyed five years after vessel-sparing radiation therapy report preserved sexual function — ScienceDaily

The study examined the patient-reported outcomes of 91 men with prostate cancer who received MRI-guided, vessel-sparing radiation at University of Michigan Providence Cancer Institute. The vessel-sparing radiation technique limits the amount of radiation to critical erectile tissues using MRI scans to identify the blood vessels responsible for erections. When radiation dose is limited to these critical structures, the risk of erectile dysfunction is lowered. …