Is a pen really mightier than the scalpel?
One of the most crucial aspects of cancer diagnosis and treatment is to determine the thin boundary between the lesional and normal tissues. So it is important to assess an accurate negative margin and to completely excise the tumor for a prolonged disease free state and increase the overall survival of the patient.
The conventional method for margin assessment is histopathological analysis which is labor-intensive, time-intensive and requires expertise. Another related method is the frozen section preparation which requires skilled technicians and pathologists. Though the technique is quite reliable, it has few disadvantages like freezing artefacts affecting the tissue structure and cell morphology. The intraoperative margin analysis increases the operating time and there is an
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1: The operational steps of the MasSpec pen
MasSpec pen has been tested on 20 thin sections of human cancer thin and 253 tissue samples from human patients including normal tissues and cancerous tissues from ovary, breast, lung and thyroid.
It can obtain non-destructively a rich molecular information from tissue samples.
The MasSpec pen is capable of identifying histologically distinct regions in a single human tissue sample. These results show that the MasSpec pen can be used to detect cancer in margins with mixed composition of normal and cancer cells by the molecular information obtained.
Thus this recent technology in the diagnosis of cancer can be exploited for OSCC detection and diagnosis and assessment. It can be used intraoperatively also to assure the complete excision of cancerous tissue which will offer a prolonged disease-free state and increase the overall survival. Thus, the MasSpec pen, considering its performance, simple design and usage with clinically desirable features enable its use in clinics or primary health care centres for routine screening and diagnosis of OSCC leading to improved patient care and