A surgical technique developed by researchers at the University College Dublin that employs AI could be breakthrough to detect cancerous tissues. During surgical procedures, the technique can discover cancerous tissue in real time to radically improve health outcomes.
The new technique demonstrates how the use of digital camera and dyes can help view cancer processes in living tissue during surgical procedures. With this capability, surgeons can view the exact extent of cancers during surgical procedure, thus, enabling them to ensure surgical removal of maximum amount of cancerous tissue.
“If cancer can be completely detected, it increases the possibility to be cured in one single surgery, or have a better sequence of combination therapies, thereby markedly reducing the risk of recurrence or complications for patients,” stated one of the researchers behind the technique.
“In fact, the dynamic digital discrimination of cancer exactly at the time of intervention implies the surgical team can work better for the right intervention to the individual patient at the first time itself. Importantly, for this, the tools that are being developed are straightforward to deploy and use. This allows users to easily interpret findings without having to develop further specialist knowledge,” added the researcher.
Earlier, for cancer detection, surgeons had considerable wait times to have a formal characterization of tissue types performed by laboratories. Furthermore, delays were experienced for assessing responsiveness to medical treatments by means of radiological imaging.
On the other hand, the new approach allows detection of cancerous tissue not only from appearance, but behavior too that allows it to be clearly distinguished from normal tissues in the vicinity.