Surgeons currently rely mostly upon visual inspection and palpation to determine where the edges of a tumor are during resection procedures. This is inaccurate and leads to inferior surgical outcomes (poor extent of resection), which correlates with poor patient outcomes and could necessitate additional resection procedures.
While intraoperative frozen-section analysis (FSA) of excised tissues is possible, the amount of tissue that can be interrogated by FSA is limited, the image quality of FSA is not ideal, it can be slow (~30 min or more), and tissue orientation can be lost (the tissue must be transported out of the operating room). We are developing a number of optical-imaging approaches to allow surgeons to rapidly visualize the surfaces of freshly excised surgical specimens to identify positive margins and to enable more-complete resections.
