Tag Archives: publishing

Potential new breathalyzer for lung cancer screening

Their work, described in a paper published this week in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, from AIP Publishing, demonstrates the potential of the device to be used as a breathalyzer for early lung cancer detection — possibly a safe and effective method of detecting cancer early that may save lives. According to the researchers, the laboratory results are promising, but the device would still need to prove effective in clinical trials before its widespread adoption as a diagnostic tool. “Our results show that the device can discriminate different kinds and concentrations of cancer related volatile organic compounds with a nearly100 percent accurate rate,” said Jin-can Lei, the primary researcher and a postdoc from the College of Optoelectronic Engineering, Chongqing University. “This would also be a rapid method in that the entire detection process in our experiment only takes about 20 minutes.” Based on a small, circular plate called fluorescent cross-responsive sensor array, a specially-designed rotary gas chamber and a data collection and processing system, the device can detect lung cancer related gases at very low concentration, or below 50 parts per billion (ppb), showing a potential to identify lung cancer at the early stage. …

Diagnostic screening: Microwave imaging of the breast may be better and safer

A better, cheaper, and safer way to look for the telltale signs of breast cancer may be with microwaves, said Neil Epstein, a NSERC CREATE I3T postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary in Canada. Epstein and his colleagues–engineering professor Paul Meaney of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering and Keith Paulsen, director of the Dartmouth Advanced Imaging Center and the Robert A. Pritzker Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Radiology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College — describe just such a microwave imaging system in the current issue of the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, from AIP Publishing…

New method for non-invasive prostate cancer screening — ScienceDaily

Now a team of researchers led by Shaoxin Li at Guangdong Medical College in China has demonstrated the potential of a new, non-invasive method to screen for prostate cancer, a common type of cancer in men worldwide. They describe their laboratory success testing an existing spectroscopy technique called surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) with a new, sophisticated analysis technique called support vector machine (SVM)…

Fresh faced: Looking younger for longer

Publishing in The FASEB Journal, the authors describe how in laboratory tests, they compared the protection offered against either UVA radiation or free radical stress by several antioxidants, some of which are found in foods or cosmetics. While UVB radiation easily causes sunburn, UVA radiation penetrates deeper, damaging our DNA by generating free radicals which degrades the collagen that gives skin its elastic quality…

Catching cancer early by chasing it: Portable diagnostic device that can travel to the patient

As described in the journal Biomicrofluidics, which is produced by AIP Publishing, a team led by Gang Li, Ph.D., from Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is developing a portable device for point-of-care diagnostic testing to detect cancer at its earliest stages. It identifies cancer biomarkers, which are biological indicators of the disease that often circulate in the blood prior to the appearance of symptoms. The new device is based on microfluidics — a technology that has rapidly expanded over the past decade and involves miniature devices that tightly control and manipulate tiny amounts of fluids for analysis through channels at the micro- and nano-scales…

Herding cancer cells to their death

If caught early, melanoma is relatively easy to treat. But in its late stages, it is a stubborn and deadly cancer. Until about a decade ago, patients survived only about seven months after starting treatment. Since then, therapies, such as vemurafenib, that specifically target signaling proteins essential to the proliferation and survival of melanoma cells have extended the lives of some patients. …