Surgical Knife Can Help Doctors Detect Cancerous Cells

Surgical Knife Can Help Doctors Detect Cancerous Cells

In what may be a fantastic advance in the way doctors operate on cancerous tumors, researchers at Imperial College London have come up with a knife that can tell if the tissue it is cutting is cancerous or not.

Knives used by doctors today vaporize tumors as they cut through them producing a very sharp type of smoke. The knife developed by Zoltan Takats analyzes that smoke to give doctors instant feedback regarding the tissue they are cutting.

By attaching the new surgical knife to a small and mobile spectrometry device it can analyze the smoke generated from the cauterized tissue and compare it to its library of other smoke samples, both cancerous and non-cancerous and give doctors a very precise diagnostic.

To get a clear idea if they cut all the cancerous cells out, doctors have to send samples to a lab and wait for the results while their patient is still on the operating table. The new knife would eliminate this very lengthy and risky procedure offering clear results in just moments.

The new knife was tested for two years with a database of 302 types of smoke coming from all types of tumors from brain to breast, colon, liver, lung and so on. The surgical knife was used to analyze tumors in 91 new cases getting the correct result every time.

Posted by George Daniels on Friday July 19 2013, 7:54 AM EST. Ref: USA Today. Link. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0