To diagnose skin cancer, doctors must do a biopsy, or take a sample of the skin and send it to a lab to be processed. It can take more than a week for the patient to get results. According to the American Cancer Society, as many as 80 percent of biopsies for some types of cancers come back negative.
TREATMENT: There are four main types of treatment for people who have skin cancer: surgery (which also includes dermabrasion and laser surgery), radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and photodynamic therapy (which uses a drug and a certain type of laser to kill cancer cells). A new type of treatment, called biological therapy, is being tested in clinical trials. With biological therapy, doctors use the patient's immune system to fight the cancer.
DIAGNOSING SKIN CANCER WITHOUT A BIOPSY: Researchers say they are working on an invention that could radically change how doctors find skin cancer. It is a hand-held, non-invasive cancer scanner that diagnoses skin lesions on a patient. The handheld scanner uses a lens to look at a patient's skin, but instead of illuminating the skin with normal white light, the device uses laser light. The laser light is used to form an image of the skin's cellular structure, and it monitors the way a
patient's cells change the reflected laser light. Doctors say those changes can tell them the chemical composition of the skin cells. Doctors would then compare that chemical signature to a database containing the chemical signatures of known cancers to see whether the patient's cells are cancerous. The device would be able to tell if a patient has a form of skin cancer within minutes.
MelaFind uses a digital camera to record suspect skin patches in 10 different bands of light, including a deep probing infrared beam that examines cells below the skin's surface. The collected images are sent to a computer and compared against thousands of malignant and benign skin images, determining in seconds whether skin cancer is likely and eliminating the need for painful, scarring biopsies.
This pattern-recognition technology was originally developed by the Department of Defense for use in spy satellites to distinguish potential military targets from civilian objects.
In a clinical trial at seven locations across the U.S. last February, researchers used MelaFind to study more than 1,800 skin lesions from 1,300 patients, finding that MelaFind's ability to accurately rule out skin cancer was 2.5 times greater than that of dermatologists.
MelaFind demonstrated 98% sensitivity (correctly identifying the disease when it is actually present) in the detection of melanomas (identifying 125 out of 127 overall melanomas) and 9.5% specificity (ability to rule out the disease when it is not present), compared to 3.6% for the 39 dermatologists who participated in the study.
It is up for review with the FDA and hopfully will get approval by the end od this.
MelaFind is a breakthrough product with the potential to save lives!!!!
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
~Charles Darwin~
Take Care,
Jimmy B
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