Radboud University hospital in Nijmegen is to start offering people with some forms of cancer a ‘one-day’ service to remove tumors and assess if all the cancerous cells have been taken away from next year.

The hospital is building three specialised operating theatres for the new approach, which involve patients finding out on the day of their operation if all cancerous cells have been removed.

At the moment, it takes some two weeks after an operation to find out if a patient has the all-clear.

Follow up

This new approach will not only cut waiting times for patients but will reduce the number of people needing follow-up treatment, professor Hein Gooszen told newspaper Trouw.

At the moment some 20% to 30% of patients need radiation or chemotherapy, Gooszen said. ‘By carrying out extra research immediately, we hope to reduce this to almost zero,’ the professor told the paper.

The hospital will do this by using a micro-MRI scanner which allows pathologists to differentiate between good and bad cells.

Siemens

The equipment is extremely expensive but manufacturer Siemens is contributing to the cost of the project, the paper says.

The project will initially concentrate on prostate cancer, gynaecological cancers and cancers of the head and neck. If the new approach is successful, it will be expanded to cover breast and other cancers.

To ensure the new approach is working, cells will also be tested in a traditional laboratory after the operation.

‘We want to be able to say after five years if this works,’ Gooszen said. He believes the Nijmegen hospital is the first in the world to offer the one-day approach.