MasSpec Pen Detects Cancer with 96% accuracy

Started by PrettyLadyDoc24
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96% might be excellent accuracy for an intraoperative diagnosis.
It might even do better than us in some circumstances. The devils in the details.

I imagine it could as a specific tool looking at margins for specific types of cancer. We will know in about 3 - 7 years if it makes FDA approval.
I am sure someone is researching Molecular POC for margins too.

These things could lessen our main connection with surgeons. That would be bad.
 
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cool ideas. here is the original paper in science translational med: Nondestructive tissue analysis for ex vivo and in vivo cancer diagnosis using a handheld mass spectrometry system

it looks like they get the best separation between cancer / non cancer by using lipid signatures.

They say it could rapidly distinguish cancer from normal tissue, but I'm not familiar with how quickly the sample is processed and data is acquired. Would have been nice to get that for those of us ignorant about the nitty gritty in the work-flow.

The sensitivity wasn't excellent for breast cancer (87.5%), but sensitivity was much better for lung cancer (97.9%). There was an overall 96.4% sensitivity for all cancer types. Specificity was OK , with some cancers they tested predictions were as low as 89.7% or reaching 100% for breast, for example. Accuracy of predicting lung cancer histologic subtypes was 93.8% for squamous and 92.2% for adenocarcinoma. So looks like there is a still a role here for microscopic assessment as an adjunct.

exciting developments!
 
coroner said:
You'd be surprised, there's a lot of bad pathologists out there. Besides, no matter how great anyone may be, no one is 100% right all the time, no one...
Click to expand...
100%? Of course not. But I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be wrong 4 times out of a 100. I wouldn't hire anyone that got every 25th case wrong.
 
icpshootyz said:
100%? Of course not. But I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be wrong 4 times out of a 100. I wouldn't hire anyone that got every 25th case wrong.
Click to expand...
It could reduce the number of cases that need to be sent to pathologists, since it is highly sensitive and thus only negative cases would require review. It isn't about it doing all of the work of pathologists, it is about it reducing by 96% of the cases that require manual reading.
 
Mad Jack said:
It could reduce the number of cases that need to be sent to pathologists, since it is highly sensitive and thus only negative cases would require review. It isn't about it doing all of the work of pathologists, it is about it reducing by 96% of the cases that require manual reading.
Click to expand...

That would depend on the cost and time involved, and the types of error leading to that 4% rate. Is mass spec cheaper than a read by a live pathologist? How long does the pen take compared to a pathologist exam in the frozen section room? Who is paid to run the mass spec machine? What errors are occurring - only false negatives, or also false positives? If there are false positives, then far more than 4% will require pathologist read anyway.
 
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