Portable, Battery-Powered Microendoscope Could Eliminate the Need for Biopsies

In a clinical study of patients in the United States and China, researchers found that a low-cost, portable, battery-powered microendoscope developed by Rice University bioengineers could eventually eliminate the need for costly biopsies for many patients undergoing standard endoscopic screening for esophageal cancer. Rice University's high-resolution microendoscope uses a 1-millimeter-wide fiber-optic cable that is attached to the standard endoscope. The cable transmits images to a high-powered fluorescence microscope, and an endoscopist uses a tablet computer to view the microscope's output. The microendoscope provides images with similar resolution to traditional histology and allows endoscopists to see individual cells and cell nuclei in lesions suspected of being cancerous. By providing real-time histological data to endoscopists, the device can help rule out malignancy in cases that would otherwise require a biopsy.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] we can just apply the probe to the site we're looking at the cell nuclei in my bottom lip right now so you can see they're all pretty small and evenly space so that's IND indicates normal healthy tissue the clinician can see this in real time and then assess whether or not they think it's normal or abnormal without having

00:00:27 to take a biopsy this device is called the high resolution microendoscope or hrme for short it consists of a fiber optic bundle that's attached to a microscope system that's all enclosed in this box right here without having to take any tissue out from the patient itself you can see what the cellular morphology is without having to do anything else you basically just have to

00:00:47 place the probe onto the tissue a clinician can make their diagnosis right at the bedside [Music] when we screen patients we're able to see what normal tissue looks like very quickly and what this allows us to do is identify which patients and which areas of the esophagus are normal are benign and do not require biopsy because

00:01:20 otherwise we would have to sample um a large number of uh patients and a large area of tissue um increasing cost increasing risk um and now with this technology we're able to see this the tissue and the cells in real time and choose to not take a biopsy which I think is just as important as diagnosing cancer we can build this device for less than

00:01:45 $3500 that's significantly less even than the cost of just a standard endoscope and in the study if the endoscopist would have treated the patients on the basis of what they saw with our high resolution micro endoc scope it would have eliminated 60% of the biopsies that were in fact unnecessary because of the high false positive rate of endoscopy and in fact

00:02:13 almost half of the patients could have been completely spared to biopsy at all so we are really excited about the potential of this to improve our ability to identify esophageal cancer at a much earlier stage when it's treatable when it's curable and to do this in a way that is in fact affordable in the places that it's most needed [Music]