A Cancer-Detecting Electronic Knife

I love gadgets. I love science. I love advances in medical technologies. I love caregiving. So this product was basically designed to catch my attention.

From Popular Science, the story of the iKnife. It’s a device that uses electrical pulses to delicately vaporize living tissue, then uses a mass spectrometer to identify compounds associated with cancerous cells in the ensuing smoke.

“the iKnife’s technology shows promise in identifying patients’ endometrial cancers with an almost 90 percent accuracy rate. ‘The iKnife reliably diagnosed endometrial cancer in seconds, with a diagnostic accuracy of 89 percent, minimizing the current delays for [patients] whilst awaiting a histopathological diagnosis.”

We live in a world where “A knife that uses electricity to cut cells, then identify the components of those cells by the wavelengths of light in the smoke” is a reality. We are in the sci-fi future we were promised, even if there are no jetpacks in sight.