Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London had a brilliant idea – maybe the smoke that is created during cancer surgery could hold within it some key information about the cancer.
So he designed a knife that can be connected to a device that will compare the smoke to a library of smoke from both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue – the comparison will return a color to indicate the results: green for good tissue, red for cancerous.
This is still being researched, but it has the potential of saving time in the operating room as well as providing more accuracy in knowing how much of the tissue to remove.
Today the patient stays on the table while tissue is sent to the lab to be tested, which takes 30 minutes or so.
Tissue samples were taken from 302 cancer patients, resulting in thousands of readings from tumors located in various places in the body to use as reference. Then in 91 subsequent tests using the “iKnife” the readings given matched identically the traditional diagnostics gathered in the lab.
Dr. Takats thinks there could be many other uses for this device, such as bacteria in the tissue.
Read more about this amazing knife on the Imperial College, London site: