A NEW GADGET MAKES CANCER SURGERY MUCH BETTER
A REAL SHARP KNIFE
SMARTEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER
Oh wow!
Sorry about the oh wow! As MISTER ScienceAintSoBad I try not to sound like a former hippie. But what’s sitting on my desk is seriously hot. I’m talking about this thing from The Imperial College Of London.
Zolton Takats (the journal Science Translational Medicine is where the article was published) has developed an “intelligent knife” for surgeons. It’s for surgeons who spend their days trying to figure out where the tumor stops and where you start – carefully cutting away cancerous tissue with just enough margin to avoid having to go in again later.
That’s the hope.
A wrong decision – and I mean a wrong decision by a half a millimeter – can be really, really bad. Leave a little too much in, and your patient may die. Take a little too much out, and you’re in court being called a cold, uncaring, nasty (and rich) doctor. Takat’s knife, with pitch perfect accuracy (more and larger studies to come I am sure), guides the doctor precisely. As the hot knife vaporizes tissue, it sucks it into an instrument – a mass spectrometer – which, with the aid of some proprietary software and miscellaneous other technology including a profile of the mix of cells that characterizes certain cancers, can let the doc know when the knife is cutting through bad tissue. Or not.
I hope you don’t have cancer. Believe me, I know how scary it is. But if you have to get help you want to lean the odds your way, right? Even with an instrument like this in your surgeon’s hands you won’t really relax until its over and they say you’re okay. But the smart knife should make the whole process a lot more predictable.
I like this.
THE CATCH?
Well it’s not a catch, really. The data look great so far. But the device still has to prove itself useful and cost effective in clinical settings. Only then will we see it come into general use. Soon I hope.
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Image credits: I’m the guilty party. My own drawing.