The HPV vaccine has made great strides in preventing cervical cancer, but it hasn't rendered the disease obsolete. Doctors still need to screen for potentially cancerous cells down there just to be on the safe side. And thanks to the recent marriage of gynecology and astrophysics, they have a new set of tools to do so.

Professional star-gazers have been using spectroscopy--the analysis of interaction between matter and radiated energy--to check out celestial bodies far, far away from our home. Now, doctors can use the same technology to take a gander at some terrestrial bodies. Guided Therapeutics has developed a way to determine whether cervical cells are cancerous or not by shining a spectrum of light on them and seeing how they reflect it. Planets and cells alike can tell you a lot about themselves when hit with particular wavelengths of light. Cancer cells in the cervix have specific cellular markers that reflect that light in a distinguishing way, making them stand out from the normal, healthy cells around them.

Not only is this technology, which has been used by NASA in the past, awesome to the point of sounding like science fiction, it's also much more effective than the most commonly used methods of detecting cervical cancer. Guided Therapeutics's scientists discovered in trials that their spectroscopy device detected 90 percent of cervical cancers about two years earlier than pap smears, which register a lot of false positives and also don't catch as many pre-cancerous cells. Those false positives lead to painful and unnecessary cervical biopsies that could be avoided entirely with the use of spectroscopy scans. 

The scanning device, which has been dubbed the LuViva Advanced Cervical Scan, will hopefully be cleared for marketing later this month. Guided Therapeutics plans to slap a price tag of only $20,000 on the thing, which is great news for smaller clinics in less developed areas. After all, the treatments for cervical cancer are pretty darn effective if the offending cells are caught early enough. If the LuViva scan were to replace the pap smear across the board, far more cases of cervical cancer could be caught long before the disease spreads to other parts of the body. And as an added plus, women wouldn't have to fear any awkward and invasive procedures, meaning they'd be more likely to go in and get their junk checked out on a yearly basis. Good news on all fronts for those in possession of a cervix.