Cancer Commentary - Caring About Cancer

The Sound of Skin Cancer: New Technique Detects Metastasizing Melanoma Signature Sound

by Gloria Gamat on October 21st, 2006

The spread of skin cancer cells through the blood by literally listening to their sound can now be detected, according to University of Missouri-Columbia researchers.

The novel, minimally invasive technique called photoacoustic detection causes melanoma cells to emit noise, enabling oncologists to spot early signs of metastases — as few as 10 cancer cells in a blood sample — before they even settle in other organs.

The said technique is a combination of laser techniques from optics and ultrasound techniques from acoustics, using a laser to make cells vibrate and then picking up the characteristic sound of melanoma cells.

In a clinical test, doctors would take a patient’s blood sample and separate the red blood cells and the plasma.

In a healthy person, the remaining cells would be white blood cells, but in a melanoma patient the sample may contain cancer cells.

To find out, doctors would put the sample in saline solution and expose it to rapid-fire sequences of brief but intense blue-laser pulses, each lasting just five billionths of a second.

The Missouri-Columbia team, in lab tests, was able to detect melanoma cells obtained from actual patients, showing that the method can spot as few as 10 cells in saline solution.

The results of the successful experimental tests appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Optics Letters, published by the Optical Society of America.

Find more details from the OSA press release.

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