Diagnosis of melanoma
Scientists from Russia are close to creating "error-free" tests for skin cancer
Samara doctors and physicists have created a system that allows you to find even the earliest and inconspicuous traces of skin cancer with almost 100% accuracy using "satellite" imaging technologies. The press service of Project 5-100 tells about the first results of its testing.
"Research is very active, we are conducting additional experiments to improve the algorithm of classification of pathologies. At the moment, about a thousand spectra of various skin tissue samples have already been studied. We are also working on improving the accuracy of diagnostics using our device – now it reaches about 97%," says Ivan Bratchenko from Samara National Research University.
According to official WHO statistics, prolonged exposure to the sun remains the main cause of the development of melanoma and other forms of skin cancer. This is due to the fact that the ultraviolet radiation of the luminary either directly destroys DNA, or interacts with molecules in the cells of our skin and turns some of them into carcinogens.
Up to 9,000 new cases of melanoma, the most common malignant skin tumor that quickly metastasizes, are diagnosed annually in Russia. Approximately 40% of patients cannot be saved due to late detection of cancer, while with early diagnosis, melanoma is curable in 90% of cases.
The main problem, as Bratchenko and his colleagues note, is that the accuracy of detecting melanoma using existing diagnostic techniques and systems is now about 50-60%.
For this reason, both doctors and representatives of natural sciences are actively looking for alternative approaches to detect cancer in patients' skin photos or in their analysis data. For example, recently American doctors and mathematicians have created an artificial intelligence system capable of distinguishing cancer from moles in 72% of cases.
Russian specialists were able to make cancer diagnosis almost error-free by applying hyperspectral sensing technologies, which are currently used on space satellites and interplanetary probes to search for minerals, compile geological maps and even crop observations.
The "heart" of this technology is special cameras that "see" the world around us not only in the narrow part of the spectrum in which our eyes work, but also in all other areas of electromagnetic radiation. In fact, they receive not two-dimensional, but a kind of "three-dimensional" images, each point on which has its own spectrum.
As Russian physicists and doctors have discovered, such cameras are very good at detecting differences in how healthy skin and moles "look" on the one hand, and melanoma and other neoplasms on the other.
The first prototypes of such devices, according to the researchers, are now being tested on the basis of the Samara regional Oncological Dispensary. These devices are compact enough and easy to use so that they can be used not only in specialized cancer centers, but also for general medical examination in district polyclinics, where there are few narrow specialists.
As Bratchenko noted, some of the results of the experiments already carried out have been published in international peer-reviewed journals. The results of the latest experiments will be presented in the very near future, in June, at one of the scientific conferences.
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