Since it gets highly important for the doctors and patients to learn if the treatment for the disease is effective enough to be continued or to be changed, a new method based on computer models can predict if the brain tumor is growing despite the treatment or if it is being controlled to take necessary actions well before it is too late, reports Medical Xpress.
Northwestern Medicine researchers have finally come up with a new method which will forecast the patient's brain tumor growth. The method will enhance the possibilities of treating the tumor with a better or an alternative option to cure or control the disease within a responsive time frame.
"When a hurricane is approaching, weather models tell us where it's going," said senior author Kristin Swanson, professor and vice chair of research for neurological surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, according to Medical Xpress. "Our brain tumor model does the same thing. We know how much and where the tumor will grow. Then we can know how much the treatment deflected that growth and directly relate that to impact on patient survival."
Swanson added that finding the effectiveness of a treatment will help in a better treatment plan which can help the patients earlier than thought.
"There is this muddy zone right after the first round of treatments when it's hard for the clinician to know whether to change therapy because she doesn't have the metrics that correlate to outcome," Swanson said. "The doctor can't yet gauge how much it helped."
Patients are keen to learn the positive effectiveness of the treatment which will keep them at ease, Swanson said. "On the flip side, if the therapy isn't helping, then it may not be worth the side effects he is enduring."
The unique computer model developed for each patient will predict the tumor growth in the absence of any treatment, Maxwell Neal, lead author, is a post-doctoral researcher in bioengineering at the University of Washington, explained, according to Medical Xpress.
The patient's MRI scans taken on the day of diagnosis and on the day of surgery will be compared to see if there is any difference in the speed of tumor growth or if any increase in the density of tumor cells. After comparing the size of the tumor before and after the surgery, patients will be scored based on the effectiveness of the treatment.
"The study demonstrated that higher-scoring patients survived significantly longer than lower-scoring patients and their tumors took significantly longer to recur," Neal said. "The score can guide clinicians in determining the effectiveness of the therapy."
The study is published in an online journal PLOS ONE.
