Abstract

Successful cancer surgery is achieved when the surgical bed is clear of cancer cells. The standard method to make this determination is to analyze the margins of the excised surgical specimen. Currently, frozen-section analysis (FSA) is the typical procedure for analyzing tissue specimens removed from living patients during surgery. However, FSA is characterized by considerably lower sensitivity compared with the pathologic analysis of paraffin blocks. This leads to positive margins left behind and high rates of cancer recurrence (up to 35%). Here we present a novel instrument for surgical margins analysis based on combined confocal microscopy-optical coherence tomography. Our preliminary study on over 10 surgical specimens shows instrument capability to evaluate surgical margins with high accuracy.

© 2022 The Author(s)