Listening for Cancer Cells

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia, it's now possible to detect skin cancer cells present in blood samples by listening to the sound of melanoma cells. The scientists have used a method named photoacoustic detection, which uses a laser to make cells vibrate and ultrasound techniques to pick the sound of cancerous cells. This technique is so precise that it's possible to identify the spread of cancer even if there are only ten melanoma cells in a blood sample. Still, large clinical tests must be done before this method can be widely used."

Listening for Roland Piquepaille Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

So the editors won't listen to the readers to stop posting Roland's crap, can we at least have a feature to filter him and other annoying submitters out please?
Suck it Roland. Suck it long, and suck it hard.

Checkup

[Raynor]

"In fact, the blood-test procedure could be performed regularly such as in screenings for high-risk patients, requiring just a small sample of blood, and its results would be almost immediate. "It could take just 30 minutes to find out if there are any circulating cancer cells," Viator said."

With how long many medical tests take, this should have definately made it into the brief...

Applicable to other cells?

[TubeSteak]

The sound waves produced by melanin are high-frequency ultrasounds, meaning that they cannot be heard by the human ear, even if amplified. However, researchers can pick them up with special microphones and analyze them with a computer. Other human cells do not contain pigments with the same color as melanin, so the melanin signature is easy to tell apart from other noises, said John Viator, a biomedical engineer at Missouri-Columbia and a coauthor of the Optics Letters paper.

You know how they tag cancer cells with a (radioactive) dye injection?

Well, what if they could find a dye that responded in the same fashion.

Suddenly, the technique could apply to a range of cancers.

G*D-damned anonymous nimrods!

[mmell]

Did you even read the article? It seemed to be from a reputable source, reporting current, important information of interest not only to /.'ers but to the world community. The article was concise, reasonably well written and dealt not with some incredibly distant possible technology but rather with a technology which could very soon be in routine use in oncology centers around the world.

I don't care if Roland Piquepaille is a shameless whore, trying to drive hits and business to his website (although I didn't see any of that in this article). In this instance, he has posted an article which is reasonably intelligent, reasonably presented (clicked through thirty pages of NYT to read thirty paragraphs of a story lately?), and likely to be of interest to /.'s target audience. What's your major malfunction, maggot?

Then again, I suppose the name "anonymous coward" says it all, eh?

Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

We will find that almost everyone over forty has enough cancer cells that the detection is meaningless. The real question is, "why do some people's cancer cells replicate at high rates, causing what we call cancer?'