In the future, doctors may be able to spot life-threatening blood vessel swelling more accurately, thanks to work by French scientists. 

Ganesh Sockalingum, from the University of Reims, and co-workers have developed an imaging analysis procedure and used it to investigate infrared images of artery tissue samples. They have improved on current IR tissue imaging, which is already a powerful tool for discriminating between normal and pathological samples in brain, colon or skin cancers. Current methods can often process only one image at a time but the French team's procedure can determine tissue characteristics from several images simultaneously.

Franck Bonnier, a member of the French team, outlined the motivation for the work. During heart surgery, a surgeon can be faced with a dilated aortic wall, he explained. The aorta is the artery that carries oxygenated blood from the heart and if an aortic aneurysm, where the wall is swollen, is not detected in time, the aorta may rupture. This is usually fatal unless treated swiftly. With moderate wall dilation, doctors find it hard to judge whether the aorta needs surgical replacement and there are currently no qualitative tools to guide their decisions. 

Imaging analysis could help surgeons to diagnose aneurysms during surgery

Sockalingum's group ensured that its spectroscopic analysis could reliably distinguish healthy and pathological aortic tissues. They then applied colour labelling, which takes only 20 seconds once the images have been obtained, with blue representing healthy tissue and red for damaged tissue. Bonnier explained that these images could be used by surgeons who do not have a strong background in spectroscopy and data processing.

Cyril Petibois of the University of Bordeaux, in Talence, France, who works on molecular imaging using IR, said: 'The ability to rapidly give an answer to a surgeon during surgery is the typical role that IR imaging should be able to play in the future.' 

Dominique Bertrand, another member of the research team, said that although the method is still far from practical applications, the know-how developed in the present, complex case could be applied in many fields such as medicine, genetics and biology. 

Christina Morrell