Brain-tumor patient is area's first to try laser-heat treatment

Florida Hospital has acquired a new thermal laser called NeuroBlate. It's the first hospital in Central Florida to offer the treatment, and one of only a few in the state.

Diane Bostick, who fought back breast cancer in 2009 but later found the cancer had spread to her brain, received a literal ray of hope, becoming the first person in Central Florida to undergo a new laser thermal treatment for brain tumors.

Five days later, the Orlando woman was mowing her lawn.

"I was the perfect candidate," said the wife and mother of two grown children, who had worried her doctor would say the dreaded, "There's nothing more we can do."

Bostick, 51, was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago. She fought it with chemotherapy, radiation and a lumpectomy. Despite all that, her cancer doctor told her that her form of cancer was the type that would return.

And it did. A year later, doctors found two small lesions in her brain. After brain radiation, more chemo and a surgical gamma-knife procedure, the two lesions are gone. But a third brain tumor surfaced, this one on the left side of her brain, a region that controls speech, language and memory. It was about the size of a cherry and growing.

More radiation was out, and surgery to this area can cause serious, permanent damage, said Florida Hospital neurosurgeon Melvin Field, who treated Bostick.

But Bostick was an ideal fit for treatment from a new thermal laser, a NeuroBlate System that Florida Hospital had just acquired. It's the first hospital in Central Florida to offer the treatment, and one of only a few in the state.

Bostick's procedure called laser interstitial thermal therapy was May 21.

The procedure involves inserting a probe under MRI guidance through the patient's skull and into the heart of the mass, then heating it up. Heating tumors kills them. But because heat can also kill normal brain tissue, the thermal tool lets surgeons measure the temperature of surrounding tissue.

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Brain-tumor patient is area's first to try laser-heat treatment