I’ve always thought it was pretty good engineering to take a waste product produced during a process and exploit it. In electrosurgery an electric current rapidly heats tissue, vaporizing it, producing smoke. The smoke is then extracted. What if the smoke could be analyzed in real-time (or nearly real-time) to identify what was being cut?
The inventor of the iKnife, Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London, realized that this smoke would be a rich source of biological information. To create the iKnife, he connected an electrosurgical knife to a mass spectrometer, an analytical instrument used to identify what chemicals are present in a sample. Different types of cell produce thousands of metabolites in different concentrations, so the profile of chemicals in a biological sample can reveal information about the state of that tissue.
In the new study, the researchers first used the iKnife to analyze tissue samples collected from 302 surgery patients, recording the characteristics of thousands of cancerous and non-cancerous tissues, including brain, lung, breast, stomach, colon, and liver tumors to create a reference library. The iKnife works by matching its readings during surgery to the reference library to determine what type of tissue is being cut, giving a result in less than three seconds.
The technology was then transferred to the operating theater to perform real-time analysis during surgery. In all 91 tests, the tissue type identified by the iKnife matched the post-operative diagnosis based on traditional methods.
Pretty darned clever.
More:
Dr Zoltan Takats, who invented the system at Imperial, said: “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.”
Trials are now taking place at three hospitals in London – St Mary’s, Hammersmith and Charing Cross.
Potentially, the iKnife could reduce time waiting for pathology, anyway.
I heard about this knife a while back. Such medical innovation never ceases to amaze me!
Oy. Sounds like one more toy to run up costs.
Steve
“Toy?”
Maybe that comment was just another example of something that is considered trash by one person and a treasure by another.
IMO, the iknife is another advanced medical tool that would have specific uses in attaining a quick analysis of tissues in targeted, more non-evasive ways. Hardly something to frivolously scoff at.