SNIFF OUT TUMORS WITH THE IKNIFE

New improvement in cancer surgery has arrived

A tumor is an abnormal mass of tissue, it can be benign (not cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). The terms tumor and cancer are sometimes used as synonyms which can be misleading.

A malignant tumor is resistant to treatment, may spread to other parts of the body and often recurs after removal.

That’s why a team from the Imperial College in London has elaborated the revolutionary iKnife. Surgeons often find it impossible to tell by sight where tumors end and healthy tissue begins, so cancer cells are often left behind. In order to avoid leaving some behind, surgeons remove surrounding tissue. This instrument allows surgeons to better identify and cut off the cancerous tissue.

The surgical knife uses heat to cut through the tissue, which is nothing new, but the iKnife is capable of analyzing the smoke given off when the hot blade burns through the tissue. There are actually subtle differences between the smoke of cancerous and healthy tissue that a mass spectrometer (a kind of a high-tech nose) can “smell”.

Dr Zoltan Takats, who invented the system at Imperial, said, “We believe it has the potential to reduce tumor recurrence rates and enable more patients to survive.”

It is now being tested in clinical trials, and the outlook is promising!