Think for a second about the reasons you use your eyesight in a day. Maybe you use your sight to read a textbook or to navigate campus. In these scenarios, it is easy to trust that what your eyes communicate is true to the world around you.
But allow me to raise the stakes for a minute. Instead of just the mundane everyday tasks, your eyes have taken on a huge responsibility: to accurately identify skin cancer. Do you still trust that your eyes are up to the challenge?
If you are skeptical, you are in good company. This problem is what led Dr. Negar Tavassolian, the director of Stevens Bio-Electromagnetic Laboratory, and her postdoc fellow Amir Mirbeik-Sabzevari, to develop a novel tool for skin cancer detection.
Currently, there is no set method for detecting skin cancer at the dermatology level. If a dermatologist notices skin that looks cancerous, they will send it out for biopsy.
“The only reference for a dermatologist is their eyes,” said Tavassolian. “This is extremely subjective and prone to error.”
There are two types of errors that lower the accuracy in detecting skin cancer, especially for inexperienced doctors. The first is sensitivity, or how often cancerous tissue is missed. The second is specificity, or how often benign skin is mistaken for a tumor. There are a lot of undiagnosed cases of skin cancer, and invasive biopsies that could be avoided.
The solution proposed by Mirbeik-Sabzevari and Tavassolian is handheld, fast, non-invasive, and low-cost.
The tool uses millimeter-wave radiation to identify cancerous tissues. It’s based on the ability of different materials to reflect or absorb energy. If you put an aluminum sheet into the sun for a short time, it will feel hotter than a less reflective surface, like a towel. Cancer tissue is more reflective than healthy skin, so it appears more “hot” when imaged, which makes it easier to see with the naked eye.
In their lab trials, cancerous tissues reflected about 40% more energy than healthy skin. Since it actually penetrates beneath the skin, an antenna can immediately produce an image based on areas of reflectivity.
Tavassolian already had experience using this technology for breast cancer detection, so it got her thinking about its application in dermatology.
“This really is the first time this work has been done for skin cancer, so it made me have my own doubts,” she said. “Why hasn’t anyone addressed this yet? Is there something I am missing? I was anxious to see the results.”
After the initial simulations, the team received a grant from the National Science Foundation to run lab tests of the technology. The tests required live tissues to image, so the team partnered with Hackensack University Medical Center to receive biopsied tissues. The trials were promising; they showed that not only was the technology accurate, but it showed results instantly for under $1,000.
The technology then surpassed the next big hurdle, the proof of concept, showing that it can work with accuracy in lab results. This was published in IEEE with Mirbeik-Sabzevari as the first author.
Moving forward, they will continue to develop the technology into a prototype that is more compact and portable before being manufactured in large volumes.
Ultimately, the tool will be a ubiquitous piece of a dermatologist’s tool-kit. It won’t replace the need for biopsy altogether, but instead, enhance the eye of the dermatologist.
Since skin cancer is the most common cancer, with nearly 10,000 new cases diagnosed every single day, this breakthrough could not come soon enough.
“My goal is to see that every single dermatologist has this tool,” said Tavassolian. “And I am confident we will see that eventually. It’s just a question of when.”
Mirbeik-Sabzevari is equally confident that the technology will take off, and plans to launch a startup to commercialize the tool. “This could be transformative,” he said. “No other technologies have these capabilities.”
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