A new study from Columbia Engineering developed a technology that could replace conventional biopsies and histology with real-time imaging within the living body.
MediSCAPE is a high-speed 3D microscope capable of capturing images of tissue structures that could guide surgeons to navigate tumors and their boundaries without needing to remove tissues and wait for pathology results.
The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and was conducted by Elizabeth Hillman et al.
For many medical procedures, particularly cancer surgery and screening, it is common for doctors to take a biopsy, cutting out small pieces of tissue to be able to take a closer look at them with a microscope.
In the study, the team dreamed of a bold alternative, wondering whether they could capture images of the tissue while it is still within the body.
Such a technology could give a doctor real-time feedback about what type of tissue they are looking at without the long wait.
Another major benefit of the approach is that cutting tissue out, just to figure out what it is, is a hard decision for doctors, especially for precious tissues such as the brain, spinal cord, nerves, the eye, and areas of the face.
Although some microscopes for surgical guidance are already available, they only give doctors an image of a small, single 2D plane, making it difficult to quickly survey larger areas of tissue and interpret results.
Over the past decade, the team has been developing new kinds of microscopes for neuroscience research that can capture very fast 3D images of living samples.
The team decided to test whether their technology could see anything useful in tissues from other parts of the body.
The team demonstrated the power of MediSCAPE for a wide range of applications, from analysis of pancreatic cancer in a mouse, to non-destructive, rapid evaluation of human transplant organs such as kidneys.
The team also realized that by imaging tissues while they are alive in the body, they could get even more information than from lifeless excised biopsies.
They found that they could actually visualize blood flow through tissues, and see the cellular-level effects of ischemia and reperfusion (cutting off the blood supply to the kidney and then letting it flow back in).
Eager to take this technology to the next level with a larger clinical trial, the team is currently working on commercialization and FDA approval.
Hillman and her team hope that MediSCAPE will make standard histology a thing of the past, putting the power of real-time histology and decision making into the surgeon’s hands.
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