According to a story from the Nottingham Post, the family members of brain cancer patients are putting their time and money towards the funding of a cutting edge MRI scanner for the Nottingham Children’s Hospital. The funding campaign will have to raise £2.8 million in order to buy the new scanner. This may seem like a lot of money for just one scanner, but even one has the potential to help save lives at the hospital.

The hospital has been known for some time as a leading center of pediatric neurosurgery. At this juncture, the hospital conducts over a thousand MRI scans on patients per year. However, the new machine will offer a new advantage because it can be used to scan patients while an operation is ongoing. A common treatment approach for brain cancer is surgical removal; being able to scan during a surgery can help ensure that the surgeon extracts the tumor in its entirety and does not leave any behind that can survival and grow back. To learn more about brain cancer in children, click here.

Olivia Fern was just four years old when she received her brain cancer diagnosis. The most common type of brain cancer to affect children is medulloblastoma. Her father David Fern is convinced that they new scanner will make things easier for patients that need brain surgery. He says that the scanner can reduce the number of operations necessary because in the past, doctors would have to scan after surgery in order to see what was left of the tumor. Therefore, it would mean having to do an entirely separate operation in order to get rid of the rest of the tumor, which greatly increases cost and inefficiency.

Support for the scanner from the Nottingham community has been impressive, and so far the campaign has already managed to raise around £800,000 even though the campaign had only begun on March 21st. The campaign for the new scanner is organized by the Nottingham Hospitals Charity which helps raise money for hospitals in the area as well as the University of Nottingham. Hopefully, the campaign will be successful so that the new scanner can start saving lives at the children’s hospital.

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