“Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.”
My friends,
Tiresias does not wish to lecture or hector his friends and fellow Optiscan shareholders, but it is his belief that the lack of understanding of Optiscan technology and its application, was and still is, the main reason that the uptake has been slower than even Tiresias had expected. It is therefore his belief, that it is important that as many as people as possible understand, as deeply as possible, just what this is about. It is toward this end that Tiresias puts his limited keyboard skills to the test to try to explain what it is all about. He hopes you will forgive him, if some of his post seem slightly abstruse, but he believes that understanding this technology and it’s revolutionary applicability is important.
As Tiresias has hinted, he has been around. He was not always a blind seer. He has seen and has learnt. Tiresias once took tea with the late Marvin Minsky, at Marvin’s house at Brookline, Massachusetts. Marvin Minsky built the first confocal microscope in 1955, and patented it in 1957. Although the principle of confocal microscopy is the same, Optiscan’s developments of laser digital scanning endomicroscopy is now light years ahead of that first try. Marvin was a professor of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence. Marvin and Tiresias had a very pleasant tea in the hose and the garden on a very pleasant Boston spring morning. They talked to many things; of AI, of confocal microscopy, of psychology, and of medicine and of economics. You’ll forgive Tiresias yet another little aside, some of Tiresias’s readers, who are interested in economics and financial cycles, Marvin’s brother was, Hyman Minsky, eminent economist and student of market cycles, once forgotten during the “great moderation”, but after the GFC re-remembered and rehabilitated, also worth studying.
So, now, back to confocal microscopy and why it is so important. As Tiresias has said before, conventional microscopy relies on a piece of tissue, a pink bloody blob, being immersed in a dye, then embedded in wax for a week, then sliced up with a microtome(a little guillotine), into very thin slices a few microns thick(micron = 1/1000th of a millimetre) then examined by a conventional transmission microscope, which Carl Zeiss have been the masters of for about 180 years. This, by necessity being a complex and expensive process and not applicable in life. Frozen section biopsy involves taking a little bloody lump, an even smaller small lump of tissue, and as the surgery is proceeding, squashing the bit quickly between two pieces of glass, and then examining it with a conventional microscope, trying to see if there are some malignant cell there, whilst the patient under anaesthetic waiting, and the surgeon is sitting on his hands or pacing demanding an answer. As we know, this will be obsolete once with Optiscan technology is deployed into the operating theatre. The complete edges of the wound can now be surveyed for malignant cells, with a hand-held scanner, and give virtually instant images of the cut edge and presence of malignant cells. No more blind hit and miss biopsies necessary; no hit and miss pressured histopathological interpretations. Better surgery, better and accurate and much more comple removal of malignant tissue and as importantly, preservation of normal tissue. But that is not all! This is where the confocal part comes into play. The unique feature of confocal microscopy is that it allows not only of the surface examination of the wound but also examination beneath the surface. malignant cells beneath the surface can also be seen. Depending on the tissue, Optscan’s confocal endomicroscope can actually look up to 2 mm (2000 microns) beneath the surface, previously unknown country without biopsies. Two millimetres may not seem very deep, but remember, bust cells are between 5 and 10 microns in size, so that is up to 200 cells depth! Cancer surgery and pathology is now changed! This is real why confocal endo microscopy is truly a big deal.
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