Adjunct professor of engineering Frédéric Leblond and his team, including fellow adjunct Michael Jermyn, are developing a handheld Raman spectroscopy probe that can detect cancer cells that infiltrate healthy tissue.

"Finding cancer cells can be particularly difficult with infiltrative cancers such as glioma, which invades surrounding brain tissue," writes Scientific American.

"Raman spectroscopy could help neurosurgeons find those errant cells. A team led by engineer Frédéric Leblond of Montreal Polytechnique and neurosurgeon Kevin Petrecca of McGill University, also in Montreal, has developed a Raman probe that distinguishes between normal and cancer cells. They showed their method could find previously undetectable cancer cells in the brains of glioma patients."