Introducing the Iknife Intelligent Technology
Great minds always referred to technology as an approach for humans to extend their senses and their consciousness. Think of technology -whether being your car, your watch or even your iPhone- as being your exoskeleton. An extension of you, allowing you to reach new dimensions in space and time, to do tasks beyond the limited nature of your biology. When you think about it, perhaps we may have taken this force for granted. As a doctor watching technology conquer and integrate into the world of medicine so rapidly on a large scale, I can’t help but feel a great deal of appreciation to what we have achieved as humanity altogether. The accumulation and aggregation of knowledge and so many failed experiments got us where we are now. This article is about one of the most innovative and bizarre new technologies in the world of surgical oncology today; a new breed of equipment that is revolutionizing the way cancer surgeons can extract tumours from living healthy tissue. In 1920 the discovery of electrosurgical blades -which substituted the simple blade or scalpel- transformed the way surgeons presently dissect and get through tissue. Electrocautery is a technique that uses an electric current to rapidly heat soft tissue so that surgeons can cut through it with minimal loss of blood. It’s used in all types of surgeries these days and it has majorly displaced the old cutting methods with blades and scalpels.
A team led by the surgical innovator Dr. Zoltan Takats from Imperial College London, knew that smoke that comes out of the electrical burning process, is always sucked away from the operating theatre because of its toxic nature. The real intelligence in his invention, is the realization that smoke rising out of burning cancer cells is different, in terms of chemical composition, from the smoke that comes out of healthy tissue. The I-knife is a new surgical blade that has been developed by the Imperial College London and funded by the National Institute for Health Research. Now the team at Imperial have developed a modified and intelligent electrocautery blade. The Iknife sends the smoke into a mass spectrometer, which gives a rapid readout of the chemical composition of the smoke. A super hi-tech digital nose, if you may, that is attached to the knife and lies directly above it. When a surgeon is removing a tumor, it is not always possible to tell by sight which areas of the tissue are cancerous and which parts are healthy. Due to that reason, sometimes excess tissue is taken out, or the cancer is not completely excised. The spectrometer analyses the
chemical signature in the smoke coming from the hot blade burning through soft tissue, as well as automatically updating the surgeon -within one second or even less- whether his blade is cutting through cancer cells or healthy cells. Delivering such bimolecular diagnostic techniques to the operating theatre for the benefit of the surgeon and the patient is one of the major innovations to improve surgical decision-making live in real time during surgery. Dr. Zoltan Takats who invented the system at Imperial said “the new technology has been tested on ninety one patients and showed that the knife was fully capable of accurately providing the surgeon with information as to what kind of tissue it was cutting and as a result if it was cancerous”. He also went on by saying that “its ability in providing a result almost instantly within parts of a second, which ultimately guides the surgeon on a very specific course of dissection, thus affecting the rate of survival of the patient. As this technology, clearly decreases the chances of cancer relapse by making sure no bits and pieces of the tumor, are still laying inside after surgery”. 13