A team of medical researchers has come up with a way to optically spot nerves within tissue, which should prevent nerve injuries that can happen during surgeries of the hand and other sensitive and delicate parts of the body.
The technology uses something called collimated polarized light imaging (CPLi) and by rotating the polarization, one is able to spot nerve tissue, as seen in the accompanying images made by Kenneth Chin of the University of Amsterdam. The green arrow in picture A shows a nerve, but when polarization is changed it’s not seen in picture B. The opposite happens for the nerve pointed to by the blue arrow.
The researchers compared how seasoned surgeons did at spotting nerves versus CPLi within the arms of cadavers. Remarkably, CPLi was 100% spot on, while the surgeons found 77% of the nerves.
Of course there’s still a lot of work to try and apply this technique in real surgeries, but hopefully in the not too distant future the chances of getting nerves damaged or severed during an operation will significantly diminish.
Study in Biomedical Optics Express: Evaluation of collimated polarized light imaging for real-time intraoperative selective nerve identification in the human hand…
Via: The Optical Society…