Mantis shrimp are animals with a deceiving name. Despite being called a “shrimp,” these creatures are at best remotely related to them; in fact, mantis shrimp are stomatopods, distant relatives to crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. While this misleading name is definitely interesting, mantis shrimp have a far more peculiar characteristic; their ability to detect cancer. Starting from a minute change in a small group of cells, cancer often spreads throughout the bodies of victims even before symptoms begin to appear. The discovery about the mantis shrimp’s cancer-seeing ability was made by a group of scientists from the University of Queensland in 2014. Since then, developers across the world have been working to build a camera that can recreate this capability.
Mantis shrimp, similar to all its stomatopod brethren, have visual field specializations that allow them to detect polarized light — a type of light that reflects differently off different types of tissue. Through detecting these small differences in light reflection, mantis shrimp are able to discern the existence of cancer cells. On the other hand, humans make out the world around them using hues and shades, thus are not able to distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells through sight alone.
The conventional method of detecting cancer in patients is through performing a biopsy, in which a physician extracts an amount of tissue from a patient’s body and runs it through a series of tests, including but not limited to a computerized tomography (CT) scan, bone scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) scan, ultrasound and X-ray scan. Not only is this procedure time-consuming and frankly quite expensive, patients usually do not sign up for these checkups unless certain symptoms for cancer begin to appear. Developing cameras that model the compound eyes of mantis shrimp, however, will allow for this long, cumbersome process to be shortened immensely.
For example, developers of this new technology hope that consumers will be able to use their phone cameras to take a picture, which will then be processed through an application able to detect the presence of cancer cells in the photograph. The first steps to make this innovative idea a real-life possibility have already been taken, with the aforementioned Australian scientists having created a camera able to replicate the ability of the mantis shrimp’s eyes. It is only a matter of time before this function will also be made available for phone cameras, thereby making cancer checkups available to a larger audience at a lower cost, in turn drastically reducing the number of patients that fall victim to cancer each year. In the meantime, the invention of this camera has already simplified the cancer-detecting process by significant bounds for clinics and patients alike.
Technology has never been able to overcome nature. For centuries, scientists have developed vaccines against common diseases, only for them to mutate and evolve to outpace us. This is much the same in the present world — we may never be able to ‘beat’ cancer in the sense that we will be able to completely eradicate it from the surface of the earth. However, while humanity can never overcome nature, we certainly can adapt and learn from it; and perhaps, the development of this new technology is one such example.
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