Pen-sized microscope can see cancer cells
A small pen-sized microscope can help doctors see cancer cells during tumor operations. The microscope will help surgeons completely remove malignant tumors in cancer patients.
The new technology, developed in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University and the Barrow Neurological Institute, is outlined in a paper published in January in the journal Biomedical Optics Express.
“Surgeons don’t have a very good way of knowing when they’re done cutting out a tumor,” said senior author Jonathan Liu, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “They’re using their sense of sight, their sense of touch, pre-operative images of the brain — and oftentimes it’s pretty subjective.”
“Being able to zoom and see at the cellular level during the surgery would really help them to accurately differentiate between tumor and normal tissues and improve patient outcomes,” said Liu.
The microscope can help avoid invasive operations like biopsies just to determine if a tumor or a mole is malignant or benign.
“The microscope technologies that have been developed over the last couple of decades are expensive and still pretty large, about the size of a hair dryer or a small dental x-ray machine,” said co-author Milind Rajadhyaksha, associate faculty member in the dermatology service at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “So there’s a need for creating much more miniaturized microscopes.”
The researchers hope that after testing the microscope’s performance as a cancer- screening tool, it can be introduced into surgeries or other clinical procedures within the next 2 to 4 years.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health through its National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and National Cancer Institute.
Co-authors include UW mechanical engineering doctoral students Chengbo Yin, Ye Chen, Linpeng “Peter” Wei, Steven Leigh and Michael Rosenberg; postdoctoral researchers Adam K. Glaser and Prasanth Pillai; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Sanjeewa Abeytunge, Gary Peterson and Christopher Glazowski; and Stanford University research scientist Michael Mandella.
Category: Features, Technology & Devices
