Smart Scalpel Can Distinguish Between Healthy and Cancerous Brain Tissue

Smart Scalpel(Gizmodo) – Performing any kind of surgery on the brain is already a tremendously difficult procedure, but removing only cancerous tissue is even more of a challenge because it’s very difficult to visually distinguish the good brain from the bad. But what if the scalpel in a surgeon’s hand could tell the difference between the two?

Researchers and engineers at the University of Hannover in Germany, and the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, have developed a smart scalpel that uses piezoelectric transducers on its tip to quickly tell if brain tissue is healthy or not.

It takes the modified scalpel, which looks like it has a miniature ping-pong ball on the end, just 400 milliseconds to distinguish between healthy brain tissue and the cancerous stuff using a very clever test. That tiny white sphere vibrates at an imperceptible rate causing any tissue it touches to vibrate as well. Cancerous tissue vibrates at a much different rate than healthy parts of the brain. The scalpel can distinguish between the different vibrations, and immediately provide both audio and visual feedback to the surgeon who’s wielding it.

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