I really wanted to title this post “It’s a Laser Beam, Bozo” because Real Genius is one of my very all-time favorite movies with some obscure-but-quotable lines and one very hot Val Kilmer. But I didn’t want you to think I was calling you a bozo so you got the boring title instead.
Anyway, lasers can be employed for all kinds of really cool purposes – from eye surgery, to cutting steel, to making EDM concerts way more exciting, to being employed by evil henchmen in James Bond films for nefarious purposes. And researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada have developed a potentially new and beneficial way a laser can be used.
Lasers are machines that produce focused coherent light (no, it doesn’t talk but rather that the waves are lined up in perfect order with each crest of the wave matching up – it’s what makes the laser beam monochromatic i.e. all one color). If you remember from science class, light can be either in particle (called a photon) or wave form. When photons or light waves pass through an object, they scatter. Although the official explanation way more complicated, scattering is really why the sky is blue (tell that to the next annoying person who asks you why the sky is blue and bonus points if you name drop Rayleigh scattering).
Melanoma cells differ from regular skin cells in a few important ways – they are larger, denser, and more irregularly shaped. So the team at UBC took that concept and said, “hey, what if we bounced a laser beam off melanoma cells?” Well, actually they used a lot more jargon than that. But the concept of Polarimetry basically means using a non-destructive way to bounce light waves off something and measure the scattering of those waves.
Researchers designed a low-cost device based on these principles and then examined 69 skin lesions from patients at Vancouver General Hospital to see how the light waves change as they pass through a melanoma tumor. Using this knowledge, they showed that it was possible to develop an economical device (which they insist on calling a probe in the study and I simply can’t because “probe” make me think of insertions and aliens) that can be used for routine screening. Which is awesome because as we all know by now, the earlier you detect and treat melanoma, the better the outcome.
Maybe in a generation or so, doctors of all types could incorporate an inexpensive laser to detect early stage melanomas.