Miracles and wonders: lab in a shoebox

Checking to see if she has a brain.

A scientific instrument featured on CSI and CSI: Miami for instant fingerprint analysis is forging another life in real-world medicine, helping during brain surgery and ensuring that cancer patients get effective doses of chemotherapy.

The instrument, called a "desorption electrospray ionization" mass spectrometer, or DESI, is about the size of a shoebox. Students have  carried it into a grocery store and held it close to fruits and vegetables to detect pesticides and microorganisms. 

It has also been used to identify biomarkers for prostate cancer and to detect melamine, a potentially toxic substance that showed up in infant formulas in China in 2008. In addition, DESI can detect explosives on luggage.

Now scientists want to  test the instrument in the operating room during brain cancer surgery, comparing it with traditional analysis of tissue samples by pathologists.

DESI can analyze tissue samples and help determine the type of brain cancer, the stage and the concentration of tumor cells. It also can help surgeons identify the margins of the tumor to assure that they remove as much of the tumor as possible.

 Innovations in medicine like this are happening all the time, and we are hardly aware of them.