Indocyanine Green clinical trials at UCSF

Endonasal endoscopic approaches are an established treatment for suprasellar lesions compromising the optic nerves (ON). Surgery often involves dissecting tumors from the optic nerves and its blood supply, which can result in nerve damage and visual loss after surgery. To date, there are no reliable methods to monitor the optic nerve function during surgery and thus, post-surgical visual outcomes is unknown until the patients are fully awake after surgery for a visual exam. This delay in diagnosis prevents early therapeutic measures and can result in further harm to the ON. We have recently recognized that when ICG is routinely injected during these cases to check for patency of the big arteries the sub millimetric superior hypophyseal arteries supplying (SHA) the ON are also visible and that lack of visualization of these vessels is associated with worse visual deficits after surgery. Thus, ICG may be a tool to intraoperative predict visual outcomes after endonasal approach for suprasellar lesions and fill the nondiagnostic gap. This study will assess whether endoscopic ICG angiography before and after resection of suprasellar lesions can predict post-operative visual deficits. Successful completion will provide surgeons a novel tool to assess visual function during surgery. The ICG endoscopic angiograms suggested in this study are noninvasive and currently routinely performed at the end of surgery to check for patency of big brain arteries.