Finding a brain tumor when it’s still in its early stages is tough. Even when symptoms start showing up, figuring out what’s going on can still be tricky.
Gliomas, one of the worst types of brain tumors, are especially hard to diagnose.
But scientists at Tomsk State University have come up with a new way to spot these tumors. The method is not only unique but also doesn’t involve any kind of surgery.
Using Light to See Better
The usual way to figure out the kind of tumor a patient has is to do a test called a histological examination. This test can only be done after the tumor has been taken out from the patient’s body.
But Yury Kistenev, who heads a special lab at the university, said that using light can give doctors more ways to diagnose tumors.
And the best part? This can be done without having to take any tissue from the patient’s body.
The method they used is called Raman spectroscopy. This technique uses light to spot chemical compounds in body fluids and tissues very accurately.
A Bright Experiment
The scientists first read up on the types of signs or biological markers found in glioma tissues. Then they did an experiment with lab mice.
They injected the mice with human glioblastoma cells, which are a type of glioma. They then checked the blood of the mice at different times and noted down what they found.
Using Raman spectroscopy, the scientists found specific patterns that let them tell which mice had traces of glioma in their body fluids. They could then tell which mice were healthy and which were not.
Learning from Data
The scientists collected all the new information they found and used it to teach a computer program, called a neural network. This made the process of analyzing the data much faster.
“What’s great about our method is that we can find signs of a tumor at an early stage, even before any symptoms show up,” said Kistenev.
He explained that a glioblastoma changes the chemical makeup of blood. It releases substances and tumor cells into the blood, which then spread throughout the body.
By checking these “biotraces,” doctors can find out if a person has cancer and even check how well a treatment is working.
A Future Full of Light
Scientists think this new method can also help detect other types of tumors. All bad tumors release specific chemical compounds.
If we know which biotraces are linked to a certain illness, they can be spotted using Raman spectroscopy and machine learning.
These days, light-based methods are being used more and more to quickly diagnose diseases.
The scientists at Tomsk State University are also using AI to create new ways to diagnose viral and bacterial infections in the respiratory system.
This could cut down the time it takes to analyze these infections from days to just a few minutes.
If you care about brain health, please read studies about vitamin D deficiency linked to Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, and higher magnesium intake could help benefit brain health.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about antioxidants that could help reduce dementia risk, and coconut oil could help improve cognitive function in Alzheimer’s.
The study was published in Pharmaceutics.
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