LiveScience.com
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer
1 hour ago
When a surgeon is removing a tumor, it's often hard to tell where the patient's cancer ends and the normal tissue begins – which is important in ensuring that all of the cancer is removed. Now, an experimental surgical knife aims to detect cancerous tissue as it cuts.
Developed by researchers at Imperial College London, the intelligent knife, or "iKnife," sniffs out cancer cells in the smoke given off by tissue during electrosurgery, which uses an electrical current to rapidly heat and cut through the tissue. Surgeons could use the iKnife to determine whether the cells are healthy or cancerous in a matter of seconds, its creators say.
Chemists have known for several years that lipids, the fatty molecules inside cell membranes, can be used to identify cancerous tumors. But the traditional way of detecting them requires removing the cancerous tissue and analyzing it using a mass spectrometer, a device that measures the mass and structure of its component molecules.
To speed up the process, chemist Zoltán Takáts and his colleagues developed a surgical knife that can analyze lipids in the smoke given off when surgeons cut or cauterize blood vessels. In animal studies, the researchers showed that analyzing the smoke in a mass spectrometer reveals different tissue types.
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