STTR Phase I: A Novel Biosensing Device for Rapidly Mapping Volumetric Tumor Margins

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is a novel sensor to better detect tumor margins during surgical interventions for cancer. Cancer remains a substantial global healthcare burden due to high treatment costs, long-term care needs, and reduced quality of life. The limitations of existing sensor technologies include challenges with identifying tumor location or boundaries, often resulting in incomplete tumor removal. Inadequate resections contributes to cancer recurrence, requiring additional surgeries and treatments. This project presents a novel contact based biosensing technology to generate a real-time, three-dimensional map of tumors. By delivering rapid and precise spatial tumor information, the technology aims to enhance tumor removal accuracy, minimize damage to healthy tissue, and reduce cancer recurrence risks. The potential commercial impact is a novel real time diagnostic premium for the $500M robot-assisted interventional cancer market. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project aims develop an electromechanical probe for use with robotic surgical systems and sensors to sense tumor location and boundaries. The system aims to enable real time measures of tumor-specific biophysical properties including force assssments, deformation measures, and bioimpedance to generate a three-dimensional map to outline tumor location and boundaries. This volumetric information augments or supplements other information to support more precise surgical tumor removal for improving cancer treatment patient outcomes. The proposed activities include the design and development of the prototype system followed by insitu validation. The technical milestones are to 1) optimize the electrode array to enhance tumor margin detection accuracy to within 2mm, 2) correlate measured signals with available datasets to increase the tumor detection depth to at least 30 mm; and 3) optimize the scanning mode to reduce total measurement time for a surgical site. Upon completion, this project aims to demonstrate the initial feasibility of an accurate and rapid volumetric intraoperative tool for assessing tumor margins. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.