Are biopsies a thing of the past?
There's an interesting story on Reuter's today regarding a clinical study published in the May 21 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. Here's some tidbits from the Reuters article: "You don't have to invade the body in any way. We can actually obtain this information in a noninvasive manner," said Dr. Howard Chang of Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in Monday's issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. Chang and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, compared images from radiology scans such as CT scans commonly used to track cancer with lab tools called DNA microarrays -- gene chips -- that screen thousands of genes at a time. What they found was a way to translate the data from the images into a computer model that could predict what was going on with the genetic material within the tumors. The researchers said the technique may help eliminate the need for a biopsy, a procedure in which a needle is inject...