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NAIROBI: A new technique by Chinese researchers may revolutionise the diagnosis of breast cancer and make treatment and surgery easier and more effective.
This development is important for Kenyans since breast cancer is the most common type of cancer that kills women in the country. It also affects a number of men.
The technique uses a special machine placed on the breast allowing doctors to quickly confirm whether there is cancer, how far it extends and the type of the breast cancer. This is all done without having to cut breast tissue and take it to the laboratory.
The technique is called the Air Flow-Assisted Ionization (AFAI) mass spectrometry imaging method. Using it, Doctors can tell how much of the abnormal breast tissue needs to cut off thereby minimising unnecessary surgery. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.
"The method could be developed to provide surgeons with nearly real-time information to guide surgical decisions on breast cancer," said Xinxin Mao, one of the researchers from the University of Peking, China.
Dr Ahmed Kalebi, a consultant pathologist and CEO of Pathologists Lancet, the largest medical laboratory service provider in the country that diagnoses various types of cancers said the new technique once adopted into clinical use has the potential of revolutionising the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
"Currently, there is no reliable method to conclusively analyse breast and other tumours at a cellular or molecular level during surgery. These two new methods open a whole new world in diagnostics that may do to oncology and pathology what digital cameras did to Polaroid films.”
Presently, medical imaging techniques are used to provide surgeons with information about breast cancer, including mammography, ultrasound, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which are all done before surgery.
But these methods do not give doctors operating on the patient the ability to distinguish various types and grades of cancers and the extent to which they have spread to other body tissues.
Some types and grades of breast cancers require extensive surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but other types may not. This means that the new technique allows the doctors to apply appropriate treatment or surgery. The findings have been published in the latest edition of the medical journal Nature and are expected to be taken up in cancer diagnosis and treatment across the world.
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