A journey through brain cancer treatment
A/Prof Law with MRI machine
Treating brain cancer is a team effort, when a person is suspected of having a brain tumour they’ll begin their journey through treatment, starting with the first stop - Neuroradiology.
When a person presents to the hospital with symptoms that could be caused by a brain tumour, the first step would be to see the neuroradiology department. The scans taken would then need to be examined by a specialist neuroradiologist to provide their diagnosis of the presumed brain tumour.
"Some patients who come to the hospital with a headache or who’ve had a fall, would sometimes have a computed tomography (CT) scan in the emergency department. And usually, with the CT scan, we can see the abnormality and then we can refer the patient to neurosurgery or neurology – and at that point, the next scan that we would do, would be an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. An MRI scan is typically the modality of choice to try and characterise the brain tumour,” said Director of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Professor Meng Law.