Associate Professor, Surgical Oncology The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine Columbus, Ohio
Every surgeon wonders why we are still palpating tumor size in surgery, measuring margins, and resecting. We then wait for several days for our results, so when the tumor margins are incomplete, we face giving our clients bad news in recommending either close monitoring, more surgery, or other local therapies. Intraoperative assessment by performing frozen margins may not be accessible in routine veterinary surgical practice, but other technologies and techniques in the pipeline may assist in real-time surgical margin assessment. This lecture discusses some of these new techniques and technologies for surgical margin assessment in companion animals and humans.