Predicting The Outcome Of Surgery

May 12 - KGO -- People are as different on the inside as they are on the outside. That's why it's difficult to predict which heart surgery will help which patient. Now Stanford has a new high-tech approach to predicting successful surgeries.

David Lesesky, heart attack survivor: "When I started having problems, I just didn't want to take the chance."

David Lesesky didn't take a chance. he made it through the heart attack and survived surgery. Now he's doing just fine, but the outcome's not always the same. Each patient and each surgery brings its own risks.

Charles Taylor, PhD, Stanford University Bioengineer: "There's no way to guess as to how much blood flow is going to be restored."

Doctors are well on their way to using genes to detect how a certain pill will affect you. They can tell ahead of time whether you'll have side-effects or whether medication won't even work. Now Stanford researchers hope to do the same thing with heart surgery.

But now Stanford bioengineer Charles Taylor may have found a high-tech way of taking the guess work out of cardiovascular surgery.

Charles Taylor, PhD: "We build a computer model to predict what will happen to a patient in a given surgical procedure."

It's a personalized computer model of each heart patient.

Charles Taylor, PhD: "So we actually do the surgery on the computer model before it is ever done on a patient."

A 3D model of a patient with cardiovascular disease incorporates imaging data and mathematical equations.

Charles Taylor, PhD: "The question we have for this patient is that would she benefit from a procedure -- bypass procedure -- to improve blood flow down to the legs?"

The yellow shows the potential bypass path. When blood flow is simulated it's revealed that two of the vessels going into the legs were clotted off -- the surgery would not have been successful.

Charles Taylor, PhD: "What it will mean for the patient is fewer operations -- conceivably more successful operations."

And it will help keep hearts beating longer.

Early results on this computer model suggest it will be successful in predicting the outcome of cardiovascular surgeries. To learn more about this new technology, click here.

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