A New Microscope Developed at Rice Could Revolutionize Cancer Surgeries
Toward the end of most cancer surgeries comes a race against the clock, as the surgeon faces a high-stakes decision. Take out too much healthy tissue along with the tumor, and a patient could require longer to recover and experience a lower quality of life. Leave behind any cancerous cells, and the patient could need a second surgery and face an increased chance the tumor will regrow. “Tumors are sneaky,” said Alastair Thompson, a surgeon at Baylor College of Medicine who specializes in breast cancer. “They can have little threads of tumor cells that may be impossible to feel or see with the naked eye.” Determining whether the harmful tissue has been entirely excised requires a series of complicated procedures—all taking place within twenty to forty minutes, in order to minimize the risk of surgical complications to the anesthetized patient.
To enable this important call, the surgeon hands the tumor off to a pathologist, a physician whose specialty is understanding the effects of disease on the body’s tissues and fluids. What follows is an examination of the marginal layer of healthy cells that the surgeon removed along with the tumor in an attempt to ensure every last bit of cancer is gone. If those margin cells are noncancerous, then the surgeon removed enough tissue. If they show hallmarks of cancer—such as varied sizes and shapes or overly large nuclei—then the surgeon needs to remove more tissue.
The pathologist’s work requires highly specialized skills and training. It’s also difficult. An estimated one in four lumpectomies, which involve the removal of breast tissue, end without the full tumor excised. For other types of tumors, although the exact numbers vary according to the type of surgery, the rate at which cancer cells get left behind is significant.
But a new microscope, developed by researchers at Rice University in Houston, has the potential to greatly simplify this analysis. The device, called a deep-learning extended depth-of-field microscope, or DeepDOF for short, combines a conventional fluorescent microscope with a special type of lens and software that enhances the images it captures. The prototype for this microscope was recently described in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.
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