Dr. Tewari, of the Dept. of Urology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, comments on the challenges of prostate cancer surgery, namely avoiding the nerves surrounding the prostate that are critical to sexual and urinary function

One of the challenge of prostate cancer surgery is to find just a perfect area between the cancer and surrounding very important structures such as nerves. If you look at prostate which is very deep inside the body, and is surrounded by different types of nerves. These nerves are heading down towards the penis but happen to come very close to prostate. So when you're doing surgery, you can picture prostate as an orange, and the cancer as inside the orange and the peel of the orange is like the capsule. So now it's even more challenging to find the perfect plane, because on one side, our goal is to get all the cancer out, not even leave a microscopic cell, but on the other side, we want to preserve every nerve fiber which we can.