Even the best dermatologists can’t diagnose skin cancer by eye, relying on magnifying glasses to examine suspicious blemishes and scalpels to cut tissue for analysis.
Even the best dermatologists can’t diagnose skin cancer by eye, relying on magnifying glasses to examine suspicious blemishes and scalpels to cut tissue for analysis. With up to more than 70 percent of biopsies coming back negative, millions of healthy patients undergo painful, costly and unnecessary procedures. Now, using shortwave rays used in cellphones and airport security scanners, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique that detects skin lesions and determines whether they are cancerous or benign – a technology that could ultimately be incorporated into a handheld device that could rapidly diagnose skin cancer without a scalpel in sight.
The work, led by Negar Tavassolian, director of the Stevens Bio-Electromagnetics Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Amir Mirbeik-Sabzevari, not only has the ability to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies by 50 percent but also has the potential to disrupt a $5.3 billion diagnostic market for the most common cancer in the United States, with 9,500 Americans diagnosed with skin cancer each day.
“This could be transformative,” said first author Mirbeik-Sabzevari, whose work appears in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. “No other technology has these capabilities.”
The team’s technology uses millimeter-wave radiation — the same shortwave rays used in cellphones and airport security scanners. Millimeter-wave rays penetrate certain materials and bounce off others, which is how airport security knows if you leave your keys in your pocket as you walk through a scanner. Just as metal reflects more energy than your body, so cancerous tumors reflect more calibrated energy than healthy skin, making it possible to identify diseased tissue by looking for reflectivity hotspots.
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Image: Stevens researchers develop a technique based on reflectivity patterns that can distinguish multiple forms of skin cancer, including basal cell carcinoma (left) and squamous cell carcinoma (right). The work could reduce the need for unnecessary biopsies. (Credit: Stevens Institute of Technology)
