Surgeons have a new way to effectively identify and remove cancerous tissues in patients, the Associated Press reported.
Doctors reported Wednesday that a new knife has been developed that can analyze smoke and instantly determine whether a tissue is healthy or cancerous. The new tool will help surgeons remove all cancerous tissue without taking healthy tissue.
Taking too much tissue risks hurting the patient and taking too little could leave cancer cells behind. Previous surgical knives heated the tissue they cut, producing a sharp-smelling smoke. Surgeons also have to send tissue samples to a lab and wait for results to say whether they are cancerous or not.
Dr. Zoltan Takats, of Imperial College London, believed the smoke produced in cancer surgery held clues to identifying the affected tissue. He designed the "smart knife" to help better analyze the smoke.
The smart knife compares the smoke it picks up in surgery to an index of smoke signatures from cancerous and healthy tissue samples. The indicator is displayed to the surgeon like a traffic light; green means healthy, red means cancerous and yellow means unidentifiable.
"(The new knife) looks fabulous," said Dr. Emma King, a head and neck cancer surgeon at Cancer Research U.K., who was not connected to the project. "It makes sense to look at it more carefully."
The knife and its accompanying equipment cost about £250,000 ($380,000) to make, but that price will go down if the product is commercialized. About one in five breast cancer cancer patients in the U.K. need more than one surgery to fully remove a tumor. The smart knife hopes to cut down on that number.
Scientists tested the knife at three different hospitals between 2010 and 2012 and used samples collected from 302 patients. The scientists collected smoke samples containing cancers of the stomach, brain, breast, colon, liver and lung.
That data was used to create the aforementioned index and helped the smart knife correctly identify cancerous tumors in all of the 91 patients after the samples were gathered.
The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine and was accompanied by a demonstration in London. Doctors used the knife to slice open the liver of a pig, filling the room with pungent smoke.
The knife will undergo further testing but is set to eventually be submitted for regulation. The knife will help doctors end guesswork in treating cancer patients and will give them more definitive results.
"Brain cancers are notorious for infiltrating into healthy brain tissue beyond what's visible to the surgeon," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "If this can definitively tell doctors whether they've removed all the cancerous tissue, it would be very valuable."
