Spinal surgery breakthrough

Now, the world of medical science has Hyderabad’s Dr Naresh Babu to thank. The spine surgeon of city’s Mediciti Hospital has devised an innovative procedure called scrape cytology, which helps diagnose spinal disorders 30 per cent more accurately than the current tools available.

His research of two years, carried out on 40 patients, was recently honoured by the Indian Orthopaedic Association with the prestigious SP Mandal Gold Medal. His work has also been accepted for publication in the North American Spine Surgeons’ Association’s The Spine Journal.

How will scrape cytology impact medical science? Dr Naresh says, “In coming years, it will become the “gold standard’ for all the surgeons. That’s because it saves time and energy to detect the real problem. And, it doesn’t require additional infrastructure to set up, just a few glass slides.”

Explaining the procedure, Dr Naresh says, “To identify problems like lesion, tumours and fractures inside the spine, traditional practise is to take a sample tissue from the bone and send it for testing. But that sample tissue may not be representative of the problem tissue. So, it has to be repeated 4-5 times for accurate results.”

“But we have developed a method of minimally invasive spine surgery wherein we scrape the ‘problem tissue’ and identify it inside the operation theatre itself before sending it for biopsy in labs. It takes only eight minutes.”

Hundreds of patients have already undergone the procedure successfully.

But here’s the clincher. It’s the first time that the scrape technology has been deployed in hard tissue areas like bone.