A 40-year-old woman named Ruvimbo Kaviya in the UK had been experiencing severe headaches that eventually developed into bizarre spasms. The issue was a little bit more dire than the toothache she suspected as the culprit. She had a brain tumor. The risky removal made her the first person in UK history to have a tumor removed through their eye socket.
An MRI revealed meningiomas, a common type of benign brain tumor, one of which was pressing on the nerve surrounding her eye and causing severe pain. The removal of a tumor inside someone’s skull often requires removing parts of the skull, leaving the patient with gnarly incision scars and a lengthy recovery process, assuming the surgeons don’t deem them inoperable in the first place.
Kaviya’s surgeons, Asim Sheikh and Jiten Parmar, recommended a version of the procedure that was still invasive but much less so than the one requiring the removal of chunks of her skull.
Rather than slice giant gashes in her head, they made a tiny 1.5 cm incision beside her eyelid, then slid a flexible tube with a camera on it called an endoscope through her eye socket to excise the tumors. The procedure is called an endoscopic transorbital approach. It’s safer, and much faster than some traditional surgeries, and has the added benefit of reducing trauma inflicted on the patient, allowing them to more quickly recover from the surgery.
Kaviya had major brain surgery wherein a tumor was removed from the inside of her skull and she was discharged from the hospital after two days with relatively little swelling and side effects.
It wasn’t just the endoscopic camera that made this possible. When the surgery was still in its planning stages, the surgeons consulted with a biomedical engineer named Lisa Ferrie who helped them create a 3D model of Kaviya’s skull that allowed them to practice and plan the endoscopy tube’s journey through her head before they made so much as an incision on her actual skin.
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