Cancer Detecting Pen Game Changer

[Arthur Hanson]

This is about the coming convergence of two technologies that are going to radically change cancer surgery. This is about detecting cancer instantly for the surgeon rather than have to keep the patient open an extra hour for each biopsy during surgery. Its about the pen and lowering the cost of mass spectrometers.
Both these devices should be available at low cost by using the latest in semis and mems. This has the capability of not only sharply reducing the cost and complications of surgery, but radically lowering the time involved while dramatically improving the results. Semis and mems are going to radically lower the cost of medical, especially when much is converted to robotics using machine learning.
Semi/nanotechnology combined with advanced robotics guided by AI/ML are just starting to make revolutionary strides in medical and hopefully we'll see technology bring the cost down like everything else it has touched. The problem with medical is politics and medical which is built on a foundation of inefficiency and waste (not only my opinion, but that of award winning industrial engineers who worked in the field). The US has the highest cost medical, ranked 37th in quality last time I checked.


The emergence of low-cost compact mass spectrometry detectors for chromatographic analysis - ScienceDirect

Handheld Mass-Spectrometry Pen Identifies Cancer in Seconds During Surgery - IEEE Spectrum

 

[Daniel Payne]

Arthur,

Let's get a bit practical here, like considering the cost of this pen connected to a mass spectrometer:

"Mass spectrometers are expensive—easily half a million dollars—and are usually only found in high-tech research, forensic, and drug detection labs. "

With that big ticket price tag, we can expect adoption of any system like this to be quite slow, and the first systems to use it will only drive up our health care costs even more.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

Dan, that's why I posted the second link. If you look at how spectrometers work, the semi/nanotech world can do to the price of spectrometers what it has done to everything it touches. A mass spectrometer is not something that couldn't be brought down in cost dramatically and probably with a corresponding increase in functionality. If you study how mass spectrometers work, I'm sure you would agree with me.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

Arthur,

Let's get a bit practical here, like considering the cost of this pen connected to a mass spectrometer:

"Mass spectrometers are expensive—easily half a million dollars—and are usually only found in high-tech research, forensic, and drug detection labs. "

With that big ticket price tag, we can expect adoption of any system like this to be quite slow, and the first systems to use it will only drive up our health care costs even more.

Dan, here's a mass spectrometer with interface package and software for 13K.

PE Sciex API 3000 LC/MS/MS Mass Spectrometer Mass Spec with 2 rotary v – Anacapa Equipment

 

[Daniel Payne]

Arthur,

Sure, you can find a mass spectrometer for less than $500,000, but the expert author of the article wrote that his new pen requires the $500,000 model.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

Dan, having worked in labs, I have found many don't shop at all and just assume they need what everyone else is using. It's a culture of waste. Many times processes can be set up for a small fraction of the cost. Many top award winning engineers have proved this more times than I can count. The savings can be staggering, like a few hundred dollar substitute for a several hundred K item. An engineer who won engineer of the year in the Northern California told me personally, medical wasted the most money of any place he had ever been, including the military. Basically the answer is we don't know. Medical mark ups on everything are insane and beyond reason. I have seen markups of 500 to 1 and very, very sadly even far greater. I did the network set ups for some gas chromatography labs in two different highly critical industries and just from my guess I'm pretty sure the cost was a fraction of half a million. The medical industry is famous for insane mark ups. I have personally done analysis that found markups of 50 to 1 the rule, not the exception. This particular case would not surprise me at all. Medical in this country represents some of the worst corruption in the world with the US having by far the highest cost and ranking 37th in quality. On an individual basis, medical is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy the last time I checked.

One thing the semi/nanotech sector has mastered is bringing cost down dramatically through the transparency of the market and the ability to drive down costs. This is one of the largest, if not largest opportunities for the semi/nanotech industries to do well by doing good.

A few years ago I checked into pricing on sonograms and found models with the same specs where one tenth the price overseas and if you used a standard laptop interface even cheaper. US medical is famous for jacking up prices and this includes the so called experts, experts at trying to justify insane pricing. The whole medical establishment I consider the greatest criminal enterprise on the planet for the money they game the system to steal as I have written and well documented in this forum. I estimate they basically steal/gouge about 1.4 trillion dollars annually. This level of excess profit would be greater than the profit of the combined criminal cartels of the world. The Pentagon has listed debt as the greatest threat to the US and medical is creating the largest portion of our debt by far. Last time I checked, just the Medicare debt stood at 27 trillion dollars.