Apparatus and method for intraoperative real-time tumour tissue discrimination

Abstract

A hand-held bioimpedance probe has more than four electrodes and one or more multiplexers which changeably select a subset of four electrodes, possibly in a quadrilateral shape. For each tetrapolar subset, a first pair is connected to a current source by the multiplexer and a second pair is connected to a voltage sensor, with the electrodes constituting the first and second pair changing as they are switched between a plurality of configurations. The subsets may overlap and a bioimpedance value may be generated for each subset, with a bioimpedance map being produced by superimposing quadrilaterals, coloured or shaded to indicate e.g. the average value. This may iteratively determine the path of a tissue margin and a low-pass filter may be applied e.g. using a Gaussian blur. Also disclosed is an apparatus for discriminating tissue where voltage between a second pair of electrodes as well as their individual voltages are measured.

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