| AVS 59th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| In Situ Microscopy and Spectroscopy Focus Topic | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session IS+AS+BI+ET+GR+NS-TuA |
| Session: | In Situ Studies of Organic and Soft Materials and In Situ Microscopy |
| Presenter: | Z. Takats, Imperial College, UK |
| Authors: | Z. Takats, Imperial College, UK L.A. Sasi-Szabo, University of Debrecen, Hungary J. Kinross, Imperial College, UK J. Balog, Medimass Ltd. L. Muirhead, Imperial College, UK K.C. Schafer, Imperial College, UK C. Guallar-Hoyas, Imperial College, UK |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Rapid identification of biological tissues is a long-standing problem on various fields of interventional medicine, with special regard to cancer diagnostics and cancer surgery. WWhile histological techniques provide the ultimate solution for the cellular-level identification of cancer cells, the approach is extremely complex and time consuming. Nevertheless, accelerated version of histopathology (so-called ‘frozen section’ method) is widely used for the intraoperative characterization of tissue samples removed from the surgical area. Since frozen section histology is less reliable than the traditional approaches, and the accelerated procedure still takes approx. 30 minutes for a single sample, there has been ongoing research for the development of more accurate and faster methods.
Molecular spectroscopy techniques including IR, Raman, solid state NMR and mass spectrometry have been used for the characterization of intact biological tissues and showed enormous potential for the differentiation of tissues with various histologies, including multiple different types of cancer.
Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometry is based on the observation that electrosurgical dissection of vital tissues involves the ionization of various tissue constituents, with special emphasis on membrane lipids. Electrosurgical methods employ electric current for the rapid heating and evaporation of tissue material and they are widely used both for dissection and coagulation on practically all fields of surgery. Hence, the direct combination of electrosurgery with mass spectrometry provides a tissue identification methodology, where the tissue manipulation part is already widely used by surgeons and fully approved from regulatory point of view. Electrosurgical methods are also employed on the field of endoscopy, both for coagulation and dissection. Combination of endoscopy with in-situ mass spectrometric tissue identification resulted in a diagnostic device which can potentially identify lesions in body cavities in-situ, in real-time.
Electrosurgical electrode assembly and ion transfer device were embedded into working channel of commercially available colonoscope. The device was coupled with a linear ion trap mass spectrometer, and the system was utilized during diagnostic colonoscopic interventions. Adenomae, adenocarcinomae and mucosal areas affected by inflammatory bowel diseases were successfully identified, in complete agreement with histopathological examination.