iKnife - intelligent surgery

Imperial ECMC has developed a ground breaking technique for accurately identifying tumour cells during surgery, which helps to prevent cancer cells from regrowing after treatment; the technique is highlighted in a BBC news story. The Imperial group managed to solve the problem of tissue analysis without introducing any new equipment to the surgical site, by using standard electrosurgical equipment as a mass spectrometric sampling probe. The combination of the electrosurgical knife and mass spectrometric tissue analysis was termed as the ‘Intelligent surgical knife’ and then just the ’iKnife’.

The lead ECMC scientist, Dr Zoltan Takats, believes that iKnife will completely eliminate the need for sample pre-treatment prior to mass spectrometric analysis, opening the way for the in vivo application of this highly sensitive spectroscopic approach. Following initial preclinical testing, the technology was tested internationally in clinical trials in the UK, Germany and Hungary. The initial studies have revealed that the iKnife was able to deliver tissue identification information in a matter of seconds, in contrast to the 30-40 minutes of current practice, and with an accuracy of 92-100% (compared to 88-90%), depending on the tumour type.

Based on these promising results, the Imperial team is planning to commence clinical trials with patients with breast cancer using funding from the NIHR-funded Imperial BRC, Waters Corporation and the ECMC Network. This study aims to improve breast conserving surgery and will be run in collaboration with surgical/histopathology teams from Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and University College London (UCL) ECMCs.