Adding navigation to radio-guided surgery: new possibilities, new problems, new solutions

Hand-held nuclear devices have been used since the late eighties for functional guidance during surgical procedures. Using the tracer principle, these enable to detect and spatially localize radioactively marked processes and thus assist the surgeon by providing him/her with functional information in space, otherwise invisible or difficult to acquire intra-operatively. Here, we review current approaches to improve these procedures by navigation. We focus on the limitations of these systems and discuss ways to solve them thinking of a new generation of intra-operative nuclear imaging approaches that will go beyond prototypes.     «

Hand-held nuclear devices have been used since the late eighties for functional guidance during surgical procedures. Using the tracer principle, these enable to detect and spatially localize radioactively marked processes and thus assist the surgeon by providing him/her with functional information in space, otherwise invisible or difficult to acquire intra-operatively. Here, we review current approaches to improve these procedures by navigation. We focus on the limitations of these systems and d...     »