OBJECTIVEThere is a need for real-time, intraoperative tissue identification technology in neurosurgery. Several solutions are under development for that purpose, but their adaptability for standard clinical use has been hindered by high cost and impracticality issues. The authors tested and preliminarily validated a method for brain tumor identification that is based on the analysis of diathermy smoke using differential mobility spectrometry (DMS).METHODSA DMS connected to a special smoke sampling system was used to discriminate brain tumors and control samples ex vivo in samples from 28 patients who had undergone neurosurgical operations. They included meningiomas (WHO grade I), pilocytic astrocytomas (grade I), other low-grade gliomas (grade II), glioblastomas (grade IV), CNS metastases, and hemorrhagic or traumatically damaged brain tissue as control samples. Original samples were cut into 694 smaller specimens in total.RESULTSAn overall classification accuracy (CA) of 50% (vs 14% by chance) was achieved in 7-class classification. The CA improved significantly (up to 83%) when the samples originally preserved in Tissue-Tek conservation medium were excluded from the analysis. The CA further improved when fewer classes were used. The highest binary classification accuracy, 94%, was obtained in low-grade glioma (grade II) versus control.CONCLUSIONSThe authors’ results show that surgical smoke from various brain tumors has distinct DMS profiles and the DMS analyzer connected to a special sampling system can differentiate between tumorous and nontumorous tissue and also between different tumor types ex vivo.

Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation status is an important factor for surgical decision-making: patients with IDH-mutated tumors are more likely to have a good long-term prognosis, and thus favor aggressive resection with more survival benefit to gain. Patients with IDH wild-type tumors have generally poorer prognosis and, therefore, conservative resection to avoid neurological deficit is favored. Current histopathological analysis with frozen sections is unable to identify IDH mutation status intraoperatively, and more advanced methods are therefore needed. We examined a novel method suitable for intraoperative IDH mutation identification that is based on the differential mobility spectrometry (DMS) analysis of the tumor. We prospectively obtained tumor samples from 22 patients, including 11 IDH-mutated and 11 IDH wild-type tumors. The tumors were cut in 88 smaller specimens that were analyzed with DMS. With a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) algorithm, the DMS was able to classify tumor samples with 86% classification accuracy, 86% sensitivity, and 85% specificity. Our results show that DMS is able to differentiate IDH-mutated and IDH wild-type tumors with good accuracy in a setting suitable for intraoperative use, which makes it a promising novel solution for neurosurgical practice.