Cancer detected earlier, faster, with new medical imaging, Stanford s...(sily visible fluorescent patch. They the...),Health

Not only did the researchers see fluorescent patches, they could make out the individual cancerous cells. That fine resolution could allow doctors to pick up the earliest possible cancers. Contag said it could also become a useful research tool for studying the small number of cancer stem cells that are thought to establish the eventual tumor.

In the initial trial with 15 patients, the technique detected 82 percent of the polyps that were considered cancerous by a pathologist. Contag said the next step is to work with some of the additional small proteins they've found that also attach to cancerous cells. He thinks that a combination of those proteins will make the technique highly accurate.

Once the screen is ready for widespread use, Contag said it could bring accurate cancer detection to people in remote locations who otherwise don't have access to pathology labs. "A doctor could send a video in real time via the Internet to someone trained to analyze the living cell images," Contag said. This could help people begin the appropriate therapy when the cancer is still at an early stage.

Contag thinks this technique, developed in part through the cancer imaging program at the Stanford Cancer Center, could also be adapted to detect cancers in the mouth, esophagus and stomach. In addition, real-time screening could be used as a way of assessing whether a chemotherapy regimen is working. Contag said that if a tumor responds to a given chemotherapy, changes in the cells might be visible immediately. That response could allow doctors to switch patients to a new, more effective treatment if the first one results in no improvement. Currently people go through several rounds of chemotherapy before the first screen
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