The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Technology fusion charts new course in interventional gastroenterology

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Dec 30, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Technology fusion charts new course in interventional gastroenterology

Staff Reporter

Latest advances change the way cancers of the food pipe, gallstones, pancreatic diseases and bile duct disorders are treated by doctors

CHENNAI: Fusion of medical technologies is the new fascination of interventional specialists. And among the latest of these is endoultrasonography (EUS), which helps interventional gastroenterologists to combine the virtues of minimally invasive diagnosis (endoscopy) with the visual detail of the ultrasound.

Interventional gastroenterologists are looking up to EUS the way ophthalmologists are viewing optical coherence tomography, which combines the non-invasive nature of ultrasound, the clarity and high resolution imaging of the CT scan and the accuracy of laser beams.

MedIndia Hospitals, which has adopted EUS, on Wednesday demonstrated to a mixed audience of general practitioners and specialists how the technology has changed the way cancers of the food pipe, gallstones, pancreatic diseases or bile duct disorders are managed.

Around 1,000 doctors attending the National IMA Doctors' Conference witnessed the live demonstration via telemedicine of relatively new procedures performed by a team led by T.S. Chandrasekar, interventional gastroenterologist at MedIndia.

Dr. Chandrasekar said patients with advanced cancer of the oesophagus often had difficulty in swallowing even saliva and their nutrition status was heavily compromised rendering them medically unfit for administering anaesthesia. Endoscopic metallic stenting in the foodpipe opens up a feeding channel and creates a lumen. This improves the quality of life and survival rates of patients. Patients are also readied to undergo surgery later.

Endoscopy, he said, now plays a lifesaving role in the management of patients presenting with blood vomiting due to end-stage liver disease. In patients who have portal hypertension due to disruption in blood supply in the intestine-liver-heart pathway, a procedure known as banding or knotting of the bleeding vessel or glue injection to solidify the vessel is performed.

Endoscopic retrograde cholangic pancreatography technique was performed on a patient with obstructive jaundice which involved biliary (bile duct) stenting to restore the bile flow.

The CME also initiated participants into the concept of the oesophageal lab, the gastrointestinal equivalent of the cathlab. "If the cathlab detects trouble in the coronary arteries, the eosolab scans the disorders of the GI tract," Dr. Chandrasekar said.

The system helps improve outcomes of treatment of gastro oesophageal reflux disease and other problems of the foodpipe.

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