AI 'Fingerprinting' Fights Back Against Hard-to-Detect Cancers

Hard-to-detect cancers like glioblastoma can have survival rates in the single-digit percentages and require elaborate techniques to detect, treat, and monitor. Reveal Surgical is working on changing that reality through its new, AI-based Sentry technology, which leverages a combination of AI and Raman spectroscopy to provide real-time tissue diagnostics during surgery for otherwise-invisible tumors. Raman spectroscopy is the use of light scattering from a laser to detect molecular structures and compositions of a material--in this case, tissue. Chris Kent, CEO of Reveal Surgical, explained that the company uses Raman spectroscopy (which is an optical, non-invasive imaging technique) to "fingerprint" different types of tumors, allowing doctors to fingerprint a tissue sample and compare it to those on record via Reveal's software. "We've basically designed a cancer fingerprinting machine and a database of fingerprints in our system, via … Raman spectroscopy," Kent said. "We're able to offer doctors real-time molecular data about the tumor they're encountering in vivo."