time for sunday house call. joining us as always this morning dr. david somati.

the vice chairman of the department ofurology and chief of robotics here in new york. >> and dr. mark siegel. author of the inner pulse. unlocking the secret code of sick isness and health. thank you you both for joining us as usual. >> good morning. >> good morning, guys. >> nice to be joining you for the percent time. >> nice to have is you. >> thank you. interested in all of the top ives today. we are taking a look at some of the medical hopes doctors and scientists have for 2013 beginning with demeantia. affecting an estimated 35.6 million people. doctors are hoping to use mri scans to diagnose the condition. >> when you think of alzheimer's or demeanti dementt comes to mind is someone in their 70s or 80s. there s a soft type of demeantia that we are talking

to today. a sub category. about 20% of these patients get this. this is actually happens in the younger population. so we are talking about people in their 40s and 50s that they are doing just fine and all of a sudden the memory goes and they start acting completely different behavior. the frontal part of the brain has to do with the personality. temporal is the language and memory and other things. they go from being completely normal to very bizarre behavior. the way to diagnose is to do a spinal tap. have is an envasive procedure and works in about 75% of the time but now there is a new study from the university of pennsylvania published. the disease is also known as pix disease because there are changes in the nervous system. it is a focal dementia. only part of the brain is

affected. having the mri is extremely helpful. parents see their kids completely wasting away in front of their eyes. using the mri gives us the diagnose and early and hopefully intervention and treatment. >> how do you know you could have this? just forgetting things all the time or -- >> the key is to try to differentiate it from alzheimer's disease which is 5 million people a year and it is sometimes very hard to differentiate. this type of dementia that david was talking about tends to affect younger people and the characteristic is loss of emotional affect. you withdraw. don't have the social skills any more. get depressed but then get blunted, flat. it is hard to use that as a criteria to differentiate from alzheimer's. since we are coming up with more and more treatment for alzheimer's that david and i have been talking about 2012 this year targeting the beta ameloyd protein. duke university found out using

mris and pet scans and spinal fluid they can differentiate in a large percentage of the cases between alzheimer's and front temporal dementia. only the mri may be enough. that is exciting. if we can use the latest type of mri to tell us different types of dementia we will know which to target with the new treatment. >> you mentioned a pet scan. what is that? >> that looks at heat. how much radiation or how much heat something gives off. is very expensive and to take someone who is debilitated and having problems with dementia and start giving them spinal taps and putting them in pet scanners where they take several hours it would be a lot better to use an mri alone and get right to new treatments. >> spinal tap s an invasive procedure that involves bleeding and infection. >> and some people are are allergic. >> they can have reaction to this but it is expensive. and with mri is it is less

invasive and can get an earlier diagnose. it is an advancement in the field. alzheimer's was one of the topics that kept coming in. a lot of advances being made in the field. >> talking about advances. great advance in dealing with sight in a new fda approved bladeless technology that hopefully can treat cataracts properly. dr. siegel you have a cataract they used to go in. >> this s a laser that is -- a fermatosecond laser. is is what we use for lasik already. it uses this technology. a burst of light like a laser for a very short amount of time. one quadrillionth of a second. i'm not sure everyone that gets cataract operation needs one. i call it preventive medicine.

if i do a cataract operation on you, you may be able to see and not fall. the standard procedures we are using now take about 15 minutes. they involve a scalpel and ultrasound probe and needle with ultrasound. you got to get the clouded lens out of the lie. the neeye. the new procedure uses the laser to open up the lens to get the and tieror capsule of the lens out to cut the cataract into pieces and then you remove it with an ultrasound. there may be less side effects with this. may be something you could do quicker in about five minutes. one point i want to make the center that has done the most of these has only done 150 cases. david has done 4,000 robotic surgeries. before we get to the point where a surgeon has enough experience to say this is a better technique will it be covered by insurance and is it something that really should -- >> what are the risk ares

involved and are there any limitations as to who can use the procedure? >> it is a very important question because there are a lot of people that actually teak a weekend course and they take the laser courses and come back on monday and start doing this. as a patient you want to always talk to your doctor and find out how many cases they have done and what kind of complications they have had and what are the results. that is important. a lot of people may or may not understand the real problem with cataract. it is a matter of aging. as we get older the lens which is mainly water and proteins wears off and the pro he teens stick together and changes your vision. it becomes cloudy almost like you are looking lie through a stained glass. the purpose of the laser eye surgery is to really make a nice cut. it is all really precise. you can see the depth of the problem, take the old lens out and put a new lens in which is a beautiful thing and really improves the vision for these patients.

it is ambulatory surgery and takes less than an hour. not very expensives a and lot of times the insurance company may cover it. talk to your doctor and find out what is the experience of that surgeon. >> amazing technology. thank you. >> and speaking of technology. new technology could potentially help detect the deadliest form of skin cancer and maybe help sufferers receive treatment before it turns fatal. how? how it works, next. >> from skin cancer to dementia to cataracts go to fox news .com sunday house call. they want to know what advances are you hoping for in the new year. let them know. the doctors will be answering one of the questions on the air. just log right in. sunday house call will be back in just a second.

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[ male announcer ] everyone deserves the gift of all day pain relief. this season, discover aleve. all day pain relief with just two pills. welcome back. more than 76,000 americans develop melanoma ever every yd almost 10,000 die from if. the deadliest form of skin cancer. now, help he, a hand held device that could potentially spot suspicious areas. tell us about this? >> another big advancement in 2012. what happens when you find a lesion on the skin? you go to the dermatologist and they are basically look for moles or possible melanoma. what they are looking at is the

typical abc we discussed in the past. asymmetric. is the right-side and the left side the same or not. it it is not, it is a problem. look at the border. irregular border another sign of melanoma. c for color. multiple different colors, black, blue, brown. that mix is bad news and d a diameter. more than 6-millimeter also a sign that it could be melanoma. so your dermatologist is looking at this and thinking about the abcd and says we got to do a biopsy and then the pathologist would get the specimen. now, the dermatology would not only look at that but also have a scanner that would send a laser wavelength to the lesion and then instead send signals back to the scanner. that data goes into our archive of 10,000 melanoma specimen and would say whether there s a

melanoma or not. through the scanner we can actually diagnose not just the dermatologist's subjective opinion but the scanner can be a tool in diagnosing the melanoma. they have done this in 1300 patients with 98% accuracy. i think you have to be careful how to interpret the findings but it is a good tool. >> then do you avoid the biopsy part of it? >> the goal here is to avoid unnecessary the down part is it was accurate in the study 125 out of 127 melanomas were found but it also just like dermatologists will say i'm a little suspicious of that and maybe we should biopsy that. the scanner had the same problem that dermatologists do. david talked about atypical melanomas and they blood and you look at the border and the color. an additional thing, is it enlarging. i'm the first stop. a primary care doctor.

i look at it from one time to the next team. s it changing and then you better not stop with the internist. dethe dermatologist. the tool like this which is extremely exciting finding may be a tool that i can use. it is not going to get rid of the dermatologists. maybe i can say i will put the hand scanner on here and with 98% accuracy if further studies show that that is true i will be able to predict this might be a mel fo melanoma. 76,000 people get it a year. if you find it early you cure it. the 9,000 people who died 85% had late stage melanoma. we have to find it early. >> the only way to do that is get checked. do it once a year at least. >> coming up, creating new organs from skin. can they really do that? researchers discovering a new way to actually grow stem cells that could potentially revolutionize organ transplants. >> that is amazing.

plus, what kind of medical advances do you hope for in 2013? join our chat and the doctors will answer your question live. ♪ if loving you is wrong ♪ i don't wanna be right [ record scratch ] what?! it's not bad for you. it just tastes that way. [ female announcer ] honey nut cheerios cereal -- heart-healthy, whole grain oats. you can't go wrong loving it.

>> eric: back now to sunday house call. lots of folks are writing in about this issue, reprogramming skin cells that they say could potentially lead to the groafght new organs. a lot of questions are coming out on the topic on house call, foxnews.com/housecall. this has had a lot of people asking about this. what does this mean for us? >> this has a lot of imp ications nterms of transplant surgery. david will get into more of

this. we have 75,000 people a year, waiting on a transplant list for an organ, whether it's kidney, liver, cornea. the problem is, we can't get matches because you can reject it. if you get an organ that is rejected -- and even if it's not, you can end up on immunosuppress abts the rest of your life. now along comes a technology, where they use a detergent or chemical to wash out the organ and leave the structure, just the protein, collagen, just the things that call it an organ and get rid of all the cells that might be rejected and they are replacing them with your own stem cell, with adult stem cells from skin or bone marrow, or the core blood we are telling people to save -- they can use that. you repopulate the organ, once you wash out the stuff you might reject, you repopulate it.

we may use organs from cadavers and bits of your own organ. you may be able to use different sources, but it expands the possibilities of transplanting. in sweden, they use plastic as the scaffold, the building block for a trachea, and then they add in stem cells on top that grew in, they grow into the blood vessels and into the structure. you are rebuilding an organ with a scaffold and adding stem cells. >> eric: you probably see the potential every time you are in the operating room. >> 3 years ago, i would have told you if this happens, it has the potential to rev liewtionzize the field of surgery and medicine. today, i will tell you, it is here and it is happening. it will change the whole field of regenerative tissue and engineering, it is an amazing field. just imagine that someone would lose their kidneys or a limb and then they can haveta it grown

again. heart valve, esophagus, trachea. you will take the old one and put a new one in. this is because medicine has done a great job that we are living longer and longer and have you organ failure. a lot of work comes from a colleague of mine in wake forevaluate, who has spent decades and years in this field. we have seen replacement of a bladder for spina bifid a. you change someone's life. and you can take someone's stem cell from skin -- not from embryo -- the results and the controversy, so you can get stem cells or your own cells and put them on a scaffold. a plastic. now, these cells, they can grow if they are close to each other. the proximity can work and you can create a new trachea and put it back in-- how many years are you talking about this? if you go to the doctor now? >> it sounds so high tech. >> it's here!

>> for bladder, we have done this -- >> trachea, they did it in sweden. >> we are going to intest and i know heart valve. pancreas, liver and nerves take longer. but this is going to revolutionize. the fact that you can take someone's cells and regrow it into many cell, put it on a scaffold and let it grow and implant it, that's going to change the transplant field. because it's your cell, you don't need the steroids or medications that we used to give you and the rate of rejection is going to be really small. so this is great. >> eric: a medical miracle. >> that's amazing. back with sunday house call, do you have a fear of needles? stay tuned. [ sniffs ] i have a cold. [ sniffs ] i took dayquil but my nose is still runny. [ male announcer ] truth is, dayquil doesn't treat that.

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>> welcome back. are you afraid of needles? forget to take your medication on time? a wireless implant could help address these concerns, and help people with chronic diseases to get their daily treatment. >> yes. we covered this a year ago and they have advanced this. there is an implant that you put in subcuteainious.

your doctor can program that in a timely fashion, the top of the reservoir would melt and the medication would super jure system. no needles. this can revolutionize the field of diabetes. the other thing is compliance. you know, i don't know if you are take anything medication, but you can forget, you may miss some. your doctor can monitor that chamber. that's about 20 chambers, what they are working on is to go to about a year worth of medication. so very exciting for a lot of people who are afraid of needles. >> for patients out there that are afraid of shots. i have many of them myself, this could be a huge breakthrough. this will allow you to have something implanted. the company is working to have it once a year. all of your medicine of a certain kind for osteoporosis, diabetes, could be implanted once a year. i am worried about a dose dump. if it's a toxic medication, how