Question: what sort of stuff are you experimenting with at the moment and do the results look good?

Paul O'Mahoney answered on 16 Mar 2016:

One experiment I am in involved in right now is trying to help brain surgeons locate tumours with light during surgery. We do this by having the patient drink or be injected with a fluorescent dye – this dye is designed so that it only really attaches to brain tumours. So when the surgeon has opened up the skull and is looking at the brain, we can shine blue light on it and any tumour tissue shows up bright pink! This isn’t our image, but this pretty much shows what it does (beware, picture of a brain!)

We can also measure the fluorescence using an optical fibre, and this lets us quantify how much fluorescence is at whatever bit the optical fibre is in, which tells the surgeon how much tumour there is. So we took some readings in brain surgery last week and the results look very good so far! We just need to do a lot more cases and then we can think about publishing the results.