Microscope Can Scan Tumors During Surgery

When women undergo lumpectomies to remove breast cancer, doctors try to remove all the cancerous tissue while conserving as much of the healthy breast tissue as possible. But currently there's no reliable way to determine during surgery whether the excised tissue is completely cancer-free at its margins — the proof that doctors need to be confident that they have removed the entire tumor. It can take several days for pathologists using conventional methods to process and analyze the tissue.