The first advancement is in reconstruction, and now oftentimes when a person is having surgery to treat a head neck cancer, there’s also a reconstructive team—not just a single surgeon but multiple surgeons working together. Sometimes this team includes an oral surgeon, and the techniques and technologies that are used to reconstruct whatever is being treated surgically have come so far, and they continue to be new advancements.
We’re now using virtual surgical planning—basically using AI to design exactly what’s going to happen to a patient [during the surgery]. Before the surgery we create plates and models to guide and to support the reconstructive team. The other area where surgery has advanced is in minimally invasive techniques, and so a big one is the use of a robot to perform transoral robotic surgery. It sounds alarming, but when a patient’s asleep, we can actually introduce robotic arms through the patient’s mouth to access areas in their throat that we would not otherwise be able to get to, and it’s possible to do minimally invasive surgeries to remove tumors or growths from farther down in areas that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see or get to.
And the visualization is phenomenal—it’s like the highest definition you can imagine. There’s actually binocular vision, so you have depth perception, and you’ve got these tiny little arms that can have wrists, and they can do almost everything and more than your own wrists can do.
We’re also using targeted therapies as a way to reduce or avoid surgery. So this is where I think the future is. We’re having all these advances in surgery and advances in types of radiation that can be given and advances in targeted therapy and figuring out how to integrate all of these is the next chapter for us in providing care for patients with head and neck cancer.
