When a patient undergoes lumpectomies to remove a breast cancer or any other cancer, doctors try to remove all the cancerous tissue while conserving as much of the healthy breast tissue as possible. But currently, there's no reliable way to determine during surgery whether the excised tissue is completely cancer-free at its margins -the proof that doctors need to be confident that they removed all of the tumors. It can take several days for pathologists using conventional methods to process and analyze the tissue.
That's why between 20 and 40 percent of patients have to undergo second, third surgeries to remove cancerous cells that were missed during the initial procedure, according to studies. A new microscope invented to help solve this. It can rapidly and non-destructively image the margins of large fresh tissue specimens with the same level of detail as traditional pathology in no…
