Jennifer Matthews: Jim Hattaway is a 9-year survivor of melanoma. He's lucky doctors were able to treat him despite a delayed diagnosis.
Jim Hattaway: They never found a primary, which is what you call the skin cancer as it first forms on the surface of the skin. It had already gotten into my lymph system.
Jennifer Matthews: Now, technology called photonics may help doctors detect skin cancer much sooner. Researcher Jannick Rolland says it works similarly to ultrasound.
Dr. Jannick Rolland: When you do ultrasound, you're measuring the time of the sound as you're imaging, where in optics, we're measuring, in a way, the time of the light to go through some tissue.
Jennifer Matthews: Rolland demonstrates with an onion how infrared light is reflected off skin. The light travels through cables into a detector that scans the image into a computer.
Dr. Jannick Rolland: If you have cancer, you could see how these layers are being deformed or cancelled out. So, we expect a layer here and we don't see that layer. Well, we know there's cancer being formed there.
Jennifer Matthews: This technique might have kept Rolland from needing a cervical cancer biopsy that could have been dangerous.
Dr. Jannick Rolland: It turned out that I was pregnant, with my first child, but I didn't know.
Jennifer Matthews: Jim is also excited about the research.
Jim Hattaway: It will be a Godsend because hopefully, it will lead to persons like myself having their melanomas detected early.
Jennifer Matthews: He's helping in his own way by raising funds for research.
This is Jennifer Matthews reporting.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services