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by andyjohnson0 765 days ago
For this ourpose. Could a brain tumour be sampled by something less invasive like a needle biopsy?
2 comments

The treatment is probably more effective if you capture most/all of the tumor you can. For one, maybe that alone is good enough. For two, theres the fact that many tumors are a heterogenous mixture of populations of cancer cells rather than one clonal mass of cells that are genetically identical. There is a chance you might "miss" and fail to capture a particularly malignant population that might be rare at the time of surgery but might have distant metastasis before long.
Probably not. Unfortunately it will become a mandatory step, which the MRI has substituted only in diagnosis.