Iknife can Sniff Tumors, Make Risky Cancer Surgeries Easier

An intelligent knife that can detect cancerous tissues from non-cancerous ones has been developed by researchers at the Imperial College London.

The knife can make cancerous surgery both safe and effective by helping surgeons identify the tissue that has to be removed. Tests on 91 cancer patients showed that the "iknife" got the cancerous tissues 100 percent of the time.

For people who have solid state cancer, removing affected tissue becomes very important. In these cases, surgeons remove the tumor along with some healthy tissue. However, surgeons can't tell cancerous from healthy tissues by just by looking at them. So, it takes multiple surgeries to remove all the cancerous tissues. Generally, laboratory tests used to verify cancerous status of a tissue take about half an hour.

In some cases, patients are kept on anesthetic until laboratory tests confirm that the removed tissue was cancerous. The new knife makes the process easy by detecting the cancerous tissue during the operation.

Iknife can help surgeons perform operations that are now consider risky without having to wait for lab test results to show up. The procedure thus, can save costs on cancer surgeries.

The knife is essentially an upgrade to a surgical tool called "electric scalpel," which is already in use to burn through the tissue. These Electrosurgical knives minimize blood loss during an operation.

The iknife works by picking up smoke released when the surgeon is using the knife to cut through the tissue. The smoke is then sent through a tube in a mass spectrophotometer, a device that makes a chemical footprint of the atoms.

Researchers collected tissue samples from 302 surgery patients and recorded the biological characteristics of cancer tissues from various types of tumors. Note that cancerous tissues differ from healthy ones in the kind of metabolites they use. Researchers exploited this difference in creating the new cancer-detecting knife by analyzing the various biological characteristics of the cancerous tissue and feeding it into the device, creating a kind of reference library.

The device takes about three seconds to analyze the cancerous tissue and process the results. Iknife uses a "traffic display" system to show results; red when the tissue is cancerous and green when it is a healthy tissue while yellow signifies uncertainty, The Guardian reported.

"These results provide compelling evidence that the iKnife can be applied in a wide range of cancer surgery procedures. It provides a result almost instantly, allowing surgeons to carry out procedures with a level of accuracy that hasn't been possible before. We believe it has the potential to reduce tumour recurrence rates and enable more patients to survive," said Dr Zoltan Takats, from Imperial College London, inventor of the iknife, according to a news release.

The iknife needs to go through clinical trials before being approved for use in operation theaters. Early research results have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.