At the moment, a surgeon will draw on years of experience and eyeball the cancer to make a decision on how much to cut out. Surgery can take hours.
But if Professor MacPherson’s THz trials work, doctors could instead scan the cancer first and know exactly where to cut.
It could potentially both speed things up and help preserve as much healthy skin as possible.
Early trials on patients have been carried out and more are planned for the summer.
As well as cancer, you the same approach could be used on skin disease like eczema, to analyse the skin and work out exactly the right course of treatment.
If all goes well, in five years any skin cancer patient might go for a THz scan just like a patient with a broken bone goes for an x-ray.
