Intraoperative Image Guidance in Human and Veterinary Surgical Oncology
As cancer treatments evolve and progress over time in efforts to optimize treatment outcomes and maximize survival prognoses, the contributions of surgical oncologists also evolve accordingly to embrace treatment advances. An important area of development in surgical oncology is in image-guided surgical planning and surgery. The general principles of tumor staging and surgical planning in human and veterinary surgical oncology have remained relatively constant in the face of technological advances. Establishing disease stage allows for informed decisions regarding surgical dose. Advances in imaging technologies have allowed for increasingly sophisticated tumor staging, surgical planning, and intraoperative image-guided surgery. Due to the closer proximity in body size between dogs and humans compared to mice and humans, emerging imaging modalities can be evaluated and refined using dogs with spontaneously occurring tumors for increased translatability to human cancer patients. This chapter will highlight the techniques for image-guided surgical planning and surgery in two illustrative areas: sarcoma and brain tumors in veterinary and human cancer patients.
