Handheld Pen Diagnoses Cancer During Surgery | AIChE

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Handheld Pen Diagnoses Cancer During Surgery

October
2017

A new pen-like handheld device can diagnose cancer within seconds in the operating room.

The device, known as the MasSpec Pen, could make it easier for surgeons to confirm they have removed all of the cancerous tissue from a patient, thereby preventing the cancer from spreading after surgery. What鈥檚 more, it identifies cancer without destroying or damaging tissue. It will likely take at least a few years for the MasSpec Pen to become available in hospitals, but researchers are buoyed by the device鈥檚 96.3% accuracy rate in early testing.

鈥淲e hope that this is going to improve cancer surgeries and patient lives,鈥 says Thomas Milner, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Univ. of Texas (UT) at Austin. Milner got involved in developing the MasSpec Pen while working with his collaborator, study leader Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, a professor of chemistry at UT Austin. It began as a pie-in-the-sky idea, Milner says. 鈥淲e were talking, and she said, 鈥榊ou know I have this dream of a pen,鈥欌 Milner says. 鈥淎nd when she described it to me I said, 鈥極h, I think we can help you build that.鈥欌

What Eberlin envisioned was a handheld device a surgeon could use to quickly sample tiny sections of tissue around a cancerous mass or tumor. Currently, Milner says, surgical oncologists have to cut out tissue, send it to the hospital鈥檚 pathology lab, and await a pathologist鈥檚 judgment on whether the cells are cancerous or not. This can take at least a half-hour per sample, translating to a longer time under anesthesia for patients 鈥...

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