Skip to content

Comment on No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate under your skin (2023)

Comments

I think the bigger idea behind this research, which was not mentioned, is the fact that the pointing of the the multiple beams directed by the transducer can not only be used to heat up a specific point inside the body (which in their example was an "ink" that was used for creating 3D structures well below the tissue), but the fact that this could be used for things like removal of plaques, blockages, destruction of fat/lipid cells in vivo... So things like stents and angioplasty's which are currently used to open up clogged arteries in cardiac patients to prevent heart attacks, could be done in vivo, the same way they are describing in the article, but without the need to use an "ink"... So this technology definitely has multiple uses. It could also be used to target plaques in brain tissue embedded deep in the brain to directly remove amyloid plaques to treat dementia, depression, etc patients...Obviously also used to target tumor cells anywhere inside the body without using chemotherapy/radiation.

this reminds me of Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) - a treatment of cancer using X-ray beams.

because a single beam damages both healthy and cancer tissue alike (and goes through entire body like jedi's lightsaber), IMRT creates many many low dosage beams around the body from different angles.

As a result, most of healthy tissue that surrounds tumor gets exposed to a minimum radiation, but cancerous tissue accumulates required x-ray exposure from many small beams.

That is interesting, but where does it come from? It's not in the OP or in the research paper, at least not in the summary, abstract, or conclusion, or in other parts I skimmed.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1563

They already do this to treat some kinds of Parkinson's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNk3UF488mg

Even as just a meme, no-hole surgery and the technology that makes it possible may have sufficient potential to perform a valid service to medical research simply by sparking the imagination of students: reduced invasiveness is a time-honoured aim in surgical procedures, so taking it to the next (or ultimate) level does look like it's worth encouraging: a key question to some extent becomes one of language: do we still call it surgery when nothing constituting an incision is involved? Yes, we make a (very small) hole when we inject the 'ink', but injections are never referred to as being surgery. So if no-hole surgery is not a type of surgery, then what the heck kind of thing should we call it?

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.