'Intelligent knife' helps surgeons identify cancer tissue

The advance, led by Dr Zoltan Takats, has the potential to improve patient survival rates and save money for health authorities by reducing the need for secondary operations.

The intelligent knife, or iKnife has been adapted from a suite of chemical profiling technologies built by Waters Corporation and is in use at St Mary’s Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Charring Cross Hospital.

It is based electrosurgical knives that are commonly used in operating theatres. Originally developed in the 1920s, electrosurgical knives use an electrical current to heat tissue, allowing surgeons to cut through it whilst minimising blood loss. The heated tissue vaporises and gives off an aerosol that is normally extracted from the operating theatre.

Dr Takats has adapted the electrosurgical knife so that it extracts the aerosol and feeds it via a tube to a mass spectrometer in the operating theatre, which lets the surgeon know via a display if the tissue being operated on contains cancerous cells.