Great Ideas: Color Coded Surgery

 

    

        If you've taken a biology or an anatomy course, you've probably seen diagrams of the body before in your text books. These diagrams are usually nicely organized and pretty and often color-coded for the convenience of the reader. There is nothing wrong with this; these well-organized diagrams aid readers understanding. However, a real surgeon doesn't see a nice, organized picture like this when he actually performs a surgery.

         The inside of the human body is not exactly pretty; it's dark and confusing and very difficult to work with if you're a surgeon. This problem is part of why disease like cancer that cause tumors can be so difficult to deal with; surgeons have a hard time finding every part of the tumor amongst every other type of tissue inside the body.
         
              As a surgeon, Dr. Quyen Nguyen encounters this problem all too often, and realizes the need for a better way to go about surgery. In this TED talk she discusses Dr. Roger Chen and his team who been developing a kind of molecule marker that could help surgeons by lighting up (literally, with fluorescence) certain tissues (perhaps cancerous tumor tissue) and show them exactly where to cut. This kind of molecule would be a HUGE breakthrough for the medical community, and it's definitely a great idea.