(Credit: Imperial College London)
Scientists have developed an “intelligent knife” (iKnife) that can tell surgeons immediately whether the tissue they are cutting is cancerous or not.
In the first study to test the iKnife invention (based on “rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS)) in the operating theater, iKnife diagnosed tissue samples from 91 patients with 100 per cent accuracy.
It instantly (within 3 seconds) provided information that normally takes up to half an hour to reveal using laboratory tests.
The iKnife is based on electrosurgery, a technology invented in the 1920s that is commonly used today. Electrosurgical knives use an electrical current to rapidly heat tissue, cutting through it while minimizing blood loss. In doing so, they vaporize the tissue, creating smoke that is normally sucked away by extraction systems.
The inventor of the iKnife, Dr Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London, realized that this smoke would be a rich source of biological information. To create the iKnife, he connected an electrosurgical knife to a mass spectrometer, an analytical instrument used to identify what chemicals are present in a sample. Different types of cell produce thousands of metabolites in different concentrations, so the profile of chemicals in a biological sample can reveal information about the state of that tissue./.../
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