I found an interesting article on the KEYE TV out of Austin TX website. Entitled “UT Researchers Make Skin Cancer Detection Breakthrough”, the article talks about a major innovation made at the University of Texas right there in Austin. A team of researchers there, led by Dr. James Tunnell, have come up with a scanning device that will greatly reduce both the time and effort required to confirm or rule out skin cancer.
The system that we have right now consists of just your basic eyeball test to determine if a biopsy is necessary. Then the sample is sent to the lab and the patient is forced to spend a nerve wracking couple of days waiting to get the results back. The new device developed in Texas would eliminate that. It detects skin cancer simply by shining a light over the suspected area.
“Business Week” magazine is calling it one of the top inventions of the decade. With the new device, you can get a verdict of skin cancer or not right away. Its also non invasive and a whole lot easier on patients. With all these improvements, the device is at the same time a whole lot cheaper.
Dr. Tunnell says, “The low accuracy of the current method of just doing visual inspection leads to a lot of the unnecessary biopsies which has a huge cost associated with it. So each biopsy costs something on the order of $350. So, if you have six to 10 million of these that are done that you could have potentially avoided, you quickly get up into the billions of dollars that are being spent that you can hopefully avoid.”
One of the research assistants working with Dr. Tunnell on the project is graduate student, Naras Rajaran.
“With this one, we are hoping that, we can like take a lesion that’s on your forearm, we can place it there, shoot it, look at it on the computer and give you an immediate diagnosis and tell you, this is not cancer or this is cancer,”
I believe that this will also make it a whole lot easier to convince people to go get something checked out. I know I find it a whole lot easier to put off an appointment where I knew I would have to get cut on, rather than one where they are just going to pass a light over me. This is going to mean a whole lot more people going to get checked out. That’s really the key with skin cancer, because if you catch it early it is very treatable.
Its still going to take some time before this is available at your local doctor’s office. Right now the device is being used in clinical studies in Austin and Houston. After that it has to get federal approval before it’s licensed for commercial use. I’m confident that it will and its a major step in the right direction.
Remember, you should always take precautions and try to prevent the possibilities of skin cancer. This starts with smart sun knowledge and keeping out of the sun during peak hours when possible. Wear protective clothing, sunglasses, and utilize sunscreen.
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