There is the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Now, there’s the iKnife. No, it doesn’t have apps and games and music on it, but it does so much more than that. It identifies cancer cells. When removing cancer, surgeons try to cut as precisely as possible: not too much should be out, but there shouldn’t be any infectious tissue left afterwards. Hungarian chemist Zoltán Takáts wanted to speed up the identification process, and made the iKnife so that it could analyze smoke from the electrosurgical knives of surgeons to separate cancerous cells from normal, healthy ones. He now works at Imperial College of London with Jeremy Nicholson to try to put it into the surgery room. Currently, results from 81 cancer surgeries show us that the iKnife is working just as well as your average pathology lab result.
Now, it’s just a matter of getting the surgeon to use it. Most cancer-treating surgeons know the complete image before they step into the room whereas the iKnife detects the infectious cells during the surgery. It will take longer in the surgery room. So should we use it just to check everything, not use it, or rely on it completely?
To learn more, watch this video:
