Image-guided therapy developer IMRIS and partner MRI Interventions announced that a surgical team at Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth, TX, has used the companies' combined technology to perform the first pediatric laser ablation procedure.
The procedure was conducted in an IMRIS Visius surgical theater, combining the use of MRI Interventions' ClearPoint neurointervention system and IMRIS' Visius intraoperative MRI (iMRI).
ClearPoint allows for minimally invasive neurosurgery under continuous MR guidance, while Visius allows the use of MR in the operating room and over the operating table. For neurosurgery procedures, Visius iMRI brings high-field MR to the patient inside the operating room on ceiling-mounted rails. The suite allows the scanner to move between an operating room and a diagnostic room, providing access to MR images before, during, and after procedures without moving the patient, IMRIS and MRI Interventions said.
In other news, MRI Interventions plans to highlight ClearPoint at the upcoming American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) annual meeting in San Francisco.
Dr. Manish Aghi, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, will give a presentation about the system's use as a delivery platform for the investigational administration of Toca 511. The Toca 511 retroviral replicating vector carries a gene for an enzyme that converts orally delivered Toca FC (extended-release flucytosine) into fluorouracil, an anticancer agent, according to the company.
