Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania have found a way to identify lung cancer at the cellular level in real time during a biopsy, offering promise in the ability to detect the disease earlier and with more confidence. The findings, which build on previous Penn research, demonstrate that an imaging agent detected via guided technology during biopsies in real time can effectively light up cancer cells that may have been too small to detect using existing technology. Based on the more easily identifiable presence of fluorescent cancer cells generated by the new imaging approach, five non-expert raters diagnosed the malignant or non-malignant tissue biopsies with 96 percent accuracy and made no false negatives on the 20 human biopsy specimens they reviewed. The research is published this week in Nature Communications.
