Neurosurgeon Dr. Osaama Khan loves that his field is constantly evolving.
With the brain, there’s still so much to learn, the Naperville physician says. But with unresolved questions comes an inclination to innovate. In answer, cutting-edge tools materialize to push the discipline forward.
It’s an opportunity to explore that Khan relishes in — and one that he is taking advantage of right here in Chicago’s western suburbs.
Since the spring, Khan has been employing novel technology at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, which is enhancing the center’s capability to diagnose and treat brain tumors.
The technology, officially known as the NIO Laser Imaging System, combines advanced imaging with artificial intelligence to quickly diagnose brain tumors during surgery. It allows doctors to know what they’re faced with much sooner than with conventional pathology and in turn, expedite patient care, Khan said.
“It’s spectacular,” Khan said, noting that he’s had the system functioning for about two months now. “We’ve had colleagues come from downtown to take a look at the imaging and they’re already requesting some collaboration for some research projects.”
Currently, NIO Laser Imaging is in use at eight medical centers — including Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage — across the United States, as well as a few select locations in Canada and Europe, according to Chris Freudiger, co-founder of Invenio Imaging Inc., a Santa Clara, California-based startup that manufactures the NIO system.
Khan, director of Central DuPage Hospital’s Brain and Spine Tumor Center, said his team is the first to implement the technology at Northwestern Medicine. He’s been interested in getting the system up and running locally for the past few years, he said.
That was finally made possible this year with Khan being named Northwestern Medicine’s Douglas L. Johnson Endowed Chair in Neuroscience, which awarded him a three-year, $375,000 funded grant.
Established 10 years ago, the endowment honors late Central DuPage neurosurgeon Douglas Johnson. For more than two decades, he worked at the hospital. In 2003, he was commissioned as a lieutenant commander with the Naval Reserve medical corps and was deployed to Iraq as an assistant battalion surgeon for seven months with the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines Division in 2004.
Johnson died of gastric cancer in late 2013.
Khan is the fourth recipient of the Douglas L. Johnson endowment since its launch in 2014.
In a news release, Johnson’s widow, Beth, said, “This award has such meaning because it supports the dreams of my family, and it supports the dreams of other talented and excellent members of the neuroscience team at Central DuPage Hospital.”
Khan said he is honored to hold this distinction.
“It’s something that’s not only going to help me in my personal career, but (also) help bring awareness to the community of what excellence has to provide,” he said.
Khan has been with Northwestern Medicine since 2016. Born and raised in Canada, he came to DuPage Central because it offered him a unique opportunity to lead and build out the hospital’s brain tumor program, he said.
Access to NIO Laser Imaging will be a boon both clinically and in research, Khan says.
Traditionally when a patient comes in with a new brain mass, the challenge is figuring out what it is, why it’s there, how long it’s been there and if it needs to come out, he said.
That requires obtaining and analyzing a sample of the mass tissue, which can take time as samples are processed, stained and analyzed by a pathologist while the surgeon and patient wait, according to a 2020 blog post about the technology from the National Cancer Institute.
The conventional approach, Khan estimated, takes about 20 minutes. But with the NIO Laser Imaging System, diagnosis can be boiled down to a matter of a few minutes.
Beyond streamlining diagnosis and treatment, Khan is hoping the technology can also be used to widen neurosurgeons’ understanding of brain tumors outside of the operating room.
Through his eight years with Northwestern, Khan has curated a “tumor bank” that stores matter from the more than a thousand brain tumors of patients he’s operated on, he said. He wants to apply the NIO Laser Imaging System to bank tissue — to see if the technology can retroactively analyze the tumors.
The idea is that if it can, the system could internalize the information it gleans from Khan’s bank and be better equipped to diagnose in practice, especially for those cases involving rare tumors.
“Having this machine understand these thousands of brain tumors we have in our tumor bank is, I think, going to help make this machine smarter,” he said, “and get us into areas of research that haven’t been done before.”