“Even though solid tumors often look like the healthy tissue they’re invading, they almost always present as fibrous densities, hence surgeons use their fingers to feel for a difference in stiffness during extraction. Canadian researchers from the University of Western Ontario and Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics at the London Health Sciences Center have adapted a robot to identify the change in stiffness as it traverses a surface, hoping to develop this technology for cancer detection or diagnosis. So far, in lab experiments, the instrument has displayed considerably greater precision than humans at detecting the stiffness gradient.”
Article
MedGadget, 25 August 2009
