Called SMEAR-ULM, it's a high-tech system that can detect skin cancers at their earliest stages by measuring tiny temperature variations at the surface of the skin.
Led by INRS professor Jinyang Liang, the research team has published their findings in Nature Sensors.
The approach also redefines the role of temperature in cancer detection.
At the core of the system is a patch of painless microneedles that deposits specialized nanoparticles just beneath the skin.
These nanoparticles form a temporary "intelligent tattoo" that behaves like an array of microscopic thermometers.
Using an ultrafast imaging system, SMEAR-ULM captures all this information in a single high-speed snapshot, generating a detailed thermal map with submillimeter spatial resolution and sub-degree temperature sensitivity.
With this approach, the researchers successfully detected micro-melanomas as early as four days old—a stage at which they are typically far too small to be identified by conventional imaging techniques.
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