An experimental surgical knife (left) can help surgeons
make sure they've removed all the cancerous tissue, British doctors have reported;
and, as a former and current cancer patient, this is very good news to hear for
this writer.
Surgeons typically use knives that vaporize tumors
as they cut, producing a sharp-smelling smoke. The new knife analyzes the smoke
and can instantly signal whether the tissue is cancerous or healthy.
This writer was recently diagnosed with an Acral Lentiginous
Melanoma on my left foot which was surgically removed but I have to wait for
several days for my Surgical Oncologist to receive word from Pathology that he
had gotten it all; otherwise, I would have been scheduled for another
surgery. This waiting around was
mentally exhausting for me.
Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London
suspected the smoke produced during cancer surgery might contain some important
cancer clues. So he designed a "smart" knife hooked up to a
refrigerator-sized mass spectrometry device on wheels that analyzes the smoke
from cauterizing tissue.
The smoke picked up by the smart knife is compared
to a library of smoke "signatures" from cancerous and non-cancerous
tissues, information appears on a monitor: green means the tissue is healthy,
red means cancerous and yellow means unidentifiable.
To make sure they've removed the tumor, surgeons now
send samples to a laboratory while the patient remains on the operating table.
It can take about 30 minutes to get an answer in the best hospitals, but even
then doctors cannot be entirely sure, so they often remove a bit more tissue
than they think is strictly necessary. If some cancerous cells remain, patients
may need to have another surgery or undergo chemotherapy or radiation
treatment.
"(The new knife) looks fabulous," said Dr.
Emma King, a head and neck cancer surgeon at Cancer Research U.K., who was not
connected to the project. The smoke contains broken-up bits of tumor tissue and
"it makes sense to look at it more carefully," she said.
The new knife and its accompanying machines were
made for about >250,000 ($380,486) but scientists said the price tag would
likely drop if the technology is commercialized.
The most common treatment for cancers involving
solid tumors is removing them in surgery. In the U.K., one in five breast
cancer patients who have surgery will need further operations to get rid of the
tumor entirely.
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