The Tricorder device in Star Trek was thrust back into the public consciousness by the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition that aimed to build just such a device that was capable of conducting various medical tests.

A recent Stanford project has taken the vision one step closer to reality. The device, documented in a recently published paper, takes cues out of previous work designed to detect explosives buried underground. The team believe this same approach can be useful in detecting early stage cancer.

A new approach to cancer detection

When materials expand and contract when they’re stimulated with electromagnetic energy they produce ultrasound waves that then travel to the surface, where they can be detected.

This is a well understood principle that was first uncovered in 1880 by Alexander Graham Bell who discovered it when testing wireless transmission of sound.

The principle therefore is to use this approach in order to ‘hear’ objects that are hidden from sight.

Lessons from the battlefield

The project was born out of a DARPA initiative to detect explosive devices buried underground, with entrants not permitted to produce anything that actually touches the surface under which the bomb was buried.

For bomb detection, the approach works incredibly well as the microwaves heat up the suspect area and cause the ground to expand, therefore squeezing any bomb hidden within it.

Of course, this kind of thing has been used before, in ultrasounds for instance. Existing technologies require contact with the skin however, as sound waves propagate very differently in solids than they do in air.

“What makes the tricorder the Holy Grail of detection devices is that the instrument never touches the subject,” the team say. “All the measurements are made though the air, and that’s where we’ve made the biggest strides.”

The experience of using the device to detect bombs made it possible to turn attention to their ultimate goal of making a medical device that can detect cancer without touching the skin.

Touchless ultrasound

The team tested out the approach by targeting flesh like material with short microwave pulses to see if it could detect an object that had been implanted into the material.

It emerged that even small levels of heating, that are well within safety limits, was able to detect the implant from around a foot away.

“We’ve been working on this for a little over two years,” they say. “We’re still at an early stage but we’re confident that in five to ten to fifteen years, this will become practical and widely available.”

The team hope that the device will be able to detect tumors because of the way the blood vessels used to grow the cancer absorb heat at a different rate to the surrounding tissue. It would therefore show up on an ultrasound.

“We think we could develop instrumentation sufficiently sensitive to disclose the presence of tumors, and perhaps other health anomalies, much earlier than current detection systems, non-intrusively and with a handheld portable device,” they reveal.

With the device being very portable, it also has usability benefits aside from the functionality gains that the team believe it offers. It should also prove significantly less expensive than existing methods, so potentially offers a range of advantages.

It’s an exciting technology and well worth following. Check out the video below to see the team talk about the device.