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Surgeons will soon have an "intelligent" scalpel
Last reviewed: 17.10.2021
The new electroscalp allows during the operation to reveal the boundaries of the malignant tumor so as not to remove the healthy tissue. The analysis takes a couple of seconds.
Surgery for the removal of malignant neoplasms requires the surgeon virtuosic accuracy - to completely rid the patient of the tumor, preventing it from growing again, and not touching the unaffected cells. It turns out that the doctor must be able to distinguish healthy tissues from patients during the operation. In such conditions it is necessary to be either a "surgeon from God" or have a special flair. It turns out that nothing is impossible.
To help colleagues came the scientists of the Imperial College (Great Britain, London) and the University of Debrecen (Hungary), developing a "clever" scalpel that distinguishes the affected cells from healthy during surgery.
Researchers were helped by a well-known fact: a lipid membrane protects cells from the environment. In turn, the quantitative ratio of lipids makes it possible to determine to which tissue the cell belongs. Tumor tissues have their own ratio of lipid membranes. Previously, in order to identify healthy and diseased cells, it was necessary to distinguish these structures, as well as to perform their analysis after purification of lipids by means of a mass spectrometer.
The idea of the possibility of performing a lipid analysis at the time of the operation came to a chemist from Hungary Zoltan Takach. As an instrument, it was logical to use an electrosurgical knife to cauterize blood vessels. The moxibustion process promotes the formation of the necessary amount of ionized molecules to reconstruct the lipid identity of the cell. The smoke vapor emitted at the burning site, passed through a mass spectrometer, helps in the identification of cells.
The tests of the "smart" knife ("iKnife - Intelligent Knife"), in appearance more similar to tweezers, were performed on the tissues after the operation of 300 patients. After working on this technique approximately three thousand samples, a new surgical device successfully distinguished healthy cells from tumor cells in any human organ. The instrument turned out to be able to detect even secondary tumor processes that appeared by the formation of metastases from the remaining malignant cells.
The created database of healthy and diseased tissues brought scientists to the tests of an electroscalpel in real conditions. The "clever" surgical instrument participated in 81 operations and in almost all cases accurately detected the affected and healthy cells. The process of recognition took from one to three seconds, which was another advantage of the technique, because with the traditional analysis, it took at least half an hour.
The unique invention of iKnife can become an indispensable assistant in oncological surgery. It remains to make sure that the new tool relieves the neoplasm more accurately and qualitatively. This takes time to monitor patients with a "smart" knife.
It is also necessary to carry out tests for situations where a cancerous tumor is located on the border of several tissues and the detection of healthy cells from patients is complicated. It remains to be hoped that soon each surgeon will have an "intelligent" scalpel.