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Detail of breast cancer cells. Over a lifetime, one in eight women is diagnosed with breast cancer.

At first sight, an image of deep space and a slide of cancer cells may not appear to have much in common. However by using technology used to identify distant galaxies to spot rogue cancer cells, a team of scientists in the U.K. have managed to bridge that gap.

Scientists at the charity Cancer Research UK teamed up with researchers from the Institute of Astronomy in 2010 in an unlikely collaboration that could radically improve the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

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The first results of that collaboration were published in the British Journal of Cancer on Wednesday. Researchers were able to adapt techniques used by astronomers for picking up faint objects of interest out of dense images of the night-sky to pick out differences in stained tumor samples.

Raza Ali, the lead author of the study from Cancer Research, said in a statement: Weve exploited the natural overlap between the techniques astronomers use to analyze deep sky imaged from the largest telescopes and the need to pinpoint subtle differences in the staining of tumor samples down the microscope.

Cancer Research say that spotting these differences is key to the understanding of why some cancers progress faster than others, as well as of why patients respond differently to treatments.

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Up until now, the traditional means of picking out the differences in the staining of tumor samples required the trained eye of a pathologist looking down a microscope. This new automated system could dramatically speed up that process, analyzing up to 4,000 individual images a day.

The rest is here:

Astronomy Methods Used to Fight Cancer