Could A Handheld Scanner Revolutionise Cancer Screening?

The biggest factor in cancer survival rates is early diagnosis; the sooner a lump, lesion or tumour is spotted, the more treatments are available, which allows for faster, less intrusive care and an improvement in survival rates that can be measured in years.

A big part of early diagnosis is the use of medical imaging to check for early warning signs, and a major part of that is access to detailed three-dimensional scans that can check for many early signs of tumours.

A team at University College London has developed a handheld system that has the potential to revolutionise cancer screening further, allowing for high-quality, detailed images that were produced up to 1,000 times quicker than other, similar systems.

The device used photoacoustic tomography (PAT) technology, a form of ultrasound that scans for slight changes in veins and arteries.

It has historically not been clinically viable, because the scanning procedure can take over five minutes, during which time a person needs to remain perfectly still, something that is extremely difficult for most people and impossible for others.

Any movement produces a blur, which makes the image almost useless.

The UCL device, by contrast, takes less than five seconds, allowing for a much more reliable and higher quality image that can be undertaken without the need for an MRI or CT machine, although these will generally be used to confirm any findings.

A particular illustration of a clinical application of this system outside of cancer screening is inflammatory arthritis, which requires every finger joint in each hand to be scanned individually.

With older PAT machines, this took almost an hour to complete, something that was simply impossible for more frail patients, whilst the new machine is claimed to be able to do this in just a few minutes.

It also allows for changes in blood vessels that are a marker for certain types of cancer to be detected in a way impossible for other forms of conventional imaging systems.

It also makes monitoring easier; theoretically, a few seconds of scanning with the device could replace an MRI session in order to detect progression, allowing it to be done more often and more consistently.