Toronto General Hospital using new alternative to open heart surgery for biopsies
CTV
Doctors at the University Health Network have started to use a minimally invasive technique, previously used on lung patients, to carry out biopsies on patients with a mass needing diagnosis in their hearts.
Doctors at the University Health Network have started to use a minimally invasive technique, previously used on lung patients, to carry out biopsies on patients with a mass needing diagnosis in their hearts.
Susan Bell was one of those patients.
After a medical technician detected something unusual in her heart during a routine checkup last fall, Bell underwent more testing only to find out she had a large mass right in the middle of her heart.
"Nobody had ever dealt with this type of tumour," she says. "It's right in the centre part of my heart, in the wall…The complexity, the location and the size made it a really rare (thing)."
Bell's doctor told her she would need open heart surgery to biopsy the mass and determine if it was cancerous.
But he also happened to be attending a medical conference around the same time. So, he presented Bell's case and asked for alternatives to biopsy the tumour.
A colleague of his from Toronto General Hospital (TGH), Dr. Patrik Rogalla, was also there and offered to do a minimally invasive procedure to get a sample of the tissue from the heart, which he had previously done to obtain lung tissue samples.
