Dr.

Today, the growing consensus among experts is that surgery should no longer be the only therapeutic option in rectal cancer treatment. A non-invasive approach, the Watch-and-Wait protocol – which drastically reduces the toll of the disease on patients’ quality of life – has increasingly shown promising results for the treatment of such tumours. A new study now explores the next logical step: whether these patients should be submitted for life or just for a certain period to the stringent follow-up required by the protocol.

Last January, a team at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, in Lisbon, successfully tested the precision of a novel, non-invasive, 100% digital method for locating cancerous breast tumours “on the fly” during surgery. For the first time in operating room settings, a surgeon fitted with an “augmented reality” headset was able to visualise, in real-time, a virtual image of the tumour to be extracted from inside the patient’s body. 

Randy Pausch’s story is both a tragic and a generous one. He was an American computer science professor and virtual reality wizard at the University of Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, who died of pancreatic cancer in July 2008, at the age of 47.