Non-invasive lasers shine light on liver damage

Currently, surgeons have no detailed or quantitative way of assessing if a liver is healthy enough to transplant into a new person. To assess if a donor’s liver is healthy and a good match, the surgeon conducts blood tests and inspects the organ by eye and feel.

Liver transplant tech shows life-saving potential

To improve the process, scientists and surgeons from Edinburgh University, the Edinburgh Transplant Centre and Strathclyde University used Raman spectroscopy (RS) to detect damage in pigs’ livers. In recent decades, RS has been used to detect breast, oesophageal and brain cancers.

By shining a laser onto tissue from pig liver biopsies and examining the light scattered back, the team was able to detect whether red blood cells had infiltrated the main body of the liver from its blood vessels, a form of damage called congestion.

According to Edinburgh University, the quick results from the handheld RS spectrometer matched those from the more painstaking ways of assessing a liver’s health, which involve blood biochemistry and gas analysis.