Supporting the Quality of Life for Patients with Cancer

Steve Adubato is joined by Waseem Bhatti, MD, MS, Medical Director, Interventional Radiology, Summit Medical Group, to discuss innovative radiology procedures and the importance of supporting quality of life for cancer patients. '

12/14/2019 #125

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"We now welcome Doctor Waseem Bhatti, who's Medical Director of Interventional Radiology at Summit Medical Group. Good to see you Doctor. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How do you define interventional radiology? Interventional radiology is a subspecialty of radiology where we perform procedures using image guidance, using CAT scan or ultrasound guidance, I can go ahead and make an intervention in anyone's organ, depending on if they need therapy or they need a diagnosis. You know, this is part of an ongoing conversation... an ongoing series on Think Tank, that deals with the future of innovation and also the future of healthcare. They come together here. Because you've said that the future of radiology is, in some ways, your term, Star Trek medicine? Yes. Break it down. Star Trek medicine for me is, you know, a patient goes in to see the doctor, you get your diagnosis, you get your treatment, and you're out of there. That's our goal. So what we do is when a patient comes in, they get the highest quality imaging possible. We make our diagnosis. If they need a biopsy, a stent through a needle hole, if we can get that done for that patient. Now a lot of times now, our treatments are done through needle holes. Ao I could place a catheter from someone's liver if they have a tumor and treat that tumor through a small catheter, take out the catheter, the patient's ready to go home. So, as we're following along, Doctor Bhatti, I'm curious about this. The term embolization? Yes. Is that what you've just described? Or is that something different? That's exactly what I described. Basically, embolization is when we starve a tumor of blood supply. Starve? Yeah, exactly. We want to take away all of the blood supply from a tumor so that it doesn't have the nutrients it needs to grow. Now when we do that, we can also inject reactive beads in that tumor to also treat it with radiation or inject a chemotherapy agent into that tumor. Where's the innovation there? The innovation is basically, this is one of the new specialties in medicine. And 30 to 40 or 50 years ago, we weren't doing these procedures. The innovation comes with the technologies that we use. We can do a CT while the patient's on the table getting an embolization done for instance. We can combine images. So if patients already have an MRI, we could take that MRI, overlap it with current images we have in the procedure room, and use that to really efficaciously treat that tumor. I want to disclose, as we always do, that Summit is one of the many healthcare organizations that supports our efforts. But let me ask you this. What I'm curious about..."