Question: what is the worst illness you have worked with

Hazel Garvie-Cook answered on 17 Jun 2016:

I haven’t worked on that many diseases yet. People at my work though collaborate with brain surgeons who work on brain cancer, and I hope I’ll get involved with that kind of work.
Brain cancer is a serious illness. In brain surgery, it’s difficult to tell healthy brain tissue from diseased brain tissue. It’s important not to remove too much healthy tissue from the brain, because that might have a bad affect on the patient.
At the moment, surgeons rely on the appearance of the tissue. Diseased tissue looks similar to healthy tissue, so it would be better to find a different way of telling the two apart. It’s quite a risky procedure to open up someone’s head for surgery, so surgeons want to be really sure that they’ve caught all the cancer before the finish the surgery.
My company’s doing work at the moment to be able to detect brain cancer quickly during surgery using our microscope. So surgeons can know that they’ve removed all the diseased tissue and have left as much healthy tissue as possible.