UW-Madison engineers and clinicians are among the founders of a company working to find a solution to better locate tumors in breast cancer patients, according to a university release.
The researchers formed Elucent Medical after coming up with an alternative to the localization wire, a method used by physicians for the last 30 years.
Elucent Medical’s solution involves the use of radio frequency identification, a common technology for tracking and transferring data that will help surgeons better locate tumors without the pain and imprecision of localization wires.
The localization wire process detects breast tumors by inserting a thin wire into the breast through a needle to find the tumor before the patient undergoes surgery. However, the wire only marks part of the perimeter of the tumor, leaving the surgeon to estimate the rest.
"It's not something I think I would wish on anyone," Dan Van der Weide, a UW-Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of Elucent's founders, said in a statement. "It's stressful to place this wire on the day of a difficult surgery."
Elucent says their proposed solution is both cheaper and simpler than the localization wire. Since the tag can be inserted during a biopsy, it avoids the entire localization wire procedure, which ends up costing about $2,500 per patient.
Before the company can replace the localization process with their proposed solution they plan to improve the RFID tag and receive regulatory approval.
