London: Surgeons have conducted what they claim is the world's first successful brain tumour surgery on a conscious patient. Using keyhole laser surgery, a French team destroyed a brain tumour on the patient who remained wide awake and said to have felt nothing throughout the operation at the famous Piti-Salptrire hospital in Paris.

"This is the first time that laser technology has been used inside the skull and that it's associated with a MRI giving real time data," The Daily Telegraph quoted Chief Surgeon Alexandre Carpentier as telling the leading French newspaper Le Monde. In fact, the surgeons first drilled a three mm hole into the skull of the patient after administering some local anaesthetics and then inserted a tiny fibre-optic cable armed with a laser.

The doctors were then able to "see" the metastatic tumour and steer the cable -- thanks to a MRI scan, which uses magnetic and radio waves. Once inside the skull, they carried out a computer simulation of the treatment. Then they activated the laser, which heated and killed the tumour tissue for up to two minutes. The MRI scan allowed them to modify the exact energy output needed from the laser.

Once all the cancer cells were dead, the cable was removed and the patient allowed to return home the same day of the operation, the results of which have been published in the latest edition of the 'Neurosurgery' journal. According to the surgeons, their successes could pave the way for a new type of "interventional" MRI treatment but they "need" more funds to take the research further.