WhatFinger


Patternox is developing an optical scanner to detect suspicious light patterns in lesions long before changes can be seen on the skin’s surface.

Skin cancer diagnosis is about to undergo a revolution



When Ofir Aharon was finishing his PhD in electro-optics engineering, his mother was diagnosed with melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer. He decided to channel his knowledge into inventing a potentially lifesaving device that could detect unique patterns of light movements in the skin before visible signs such as changes in pigmentation show up on the surface.
“Physicians say 50 percent of skin cancer starts out ‘innocent’ and then becomes cancer, but pathologists familiar with tissue structure say 95% of lesions that look innocent already started as cancer. I wondered why there was no tool that could show the early deterioration of lesions well before they became pigmented,” Aharon tells ISRAEL21c. Aharon’s revolutionary discovery is that the movement of light scattering back to the imaging camera from a cancerous lesion looks much different than from a benign lesion. “In skin cancer we see a lot of lateral movement, mainly circular. If the lesion is normal, or if there is no lesion on the skin, this lateral movement looks random, with no prominent movements and thus no directional patterns. But in skin cancer the movement of the backscattered light goes from the middle outward or circles the middle of the lesion.” Aharon established Patternox to develop and commercialize his PatScope scanner, powered by an algorithm that extracts rotational movements from the scan. The product’s technical description is “a multifunctional device for imaging surface/volume irregularities on a skin lesion by shadow gradient pattern imaging.”-- More...

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