One clear glass bead is marked all over with a transparent fluorescent pen and mixed in with unmarked beads. Under a black lamp in a dark room, only the marked bead shows up. The marked bead stands in for a cancer cell and the rest for healthy cells.
What is happening
Image guided surgery helps a surgeon remove as much cancerous tissue as possible during surgery, so the cancer is less likely to come back, while leaving healthy tissue alone. It works by tagging tumor cells with an imaging agent. Some agents stick to tumor cells. Others are activated by enzymes or biomolecules that tumor cells produce. Many of these agents are fluorescent molecules or nanoparticles.
Fluorescence is the ability of a substance to take in light of one color and give out light of a different color. The light that comes out has lower energy than the light that went in. Some animals fluoresce, including scorpions and jellyfish.
Fluorescence is used in science wherever you need to see one thing clearly among many. It can label different parts of a cell in different colors for microscopy, and it is used for cancer imaging.
