Cancer treatment could be dramatically improved by an invention at the University of Waterloo to precisely locate the edges of tumors during surgery to remove them, Medical Xpress reports.
The new imaging technology uses the way light from lasers interacts with cancerous and healthy tissues to distinguish between them in real-time and with no physical contact, an advancement with the potential to eliminate the need for secondary surgeries to get missed malignant tissue.
"This is the future, a huge step towards our ultimate goal of revolutionizing surgical oncology," said Parsin Haji Reza, a systems design engineering professor who leads the project. "Intraoperatively, during surgery, the surgeon will be able to see exactly what to cut and how much to cut."
A paper on the work, All-optical Reflection-mode Microscopic Histology of Unstained Human Tissues, was published Sep.t 16 in the journal Scientific Reports.
Doctors now rely primarily on pre-operation MRI images and CT scans, experience and visual inspection to determine the margins of tumors during operations.
Tissue samples are then sent to labs for testing, with waits of up to two weeks for results to show if the tumor was completely removed or not.
In about 10 per cent of cases—the rates for different kinds of cancer involving tumors vary widely—some cancerous tissue has been missed and a second operation is required to remove it.
