Currently, all colon polyps are extracted during a colonoscopy and sent to a pathologist for examination, which adds time, expense and some surgical risk to the procedure, according to the release.
The study, led by Michael Wallace, MD, MPH, professor of medicine at Mayo’s College of Medicine in Florida, reported that the most advanced of these two devices, the probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (pCLE), is much more accurate than virtual chromoendoscopy, also known as narrow-band imaging. The pCLE — an imaging tool only one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter — can magnify a polyp by a factor of 1,000 to detect potentially dangerous changes in even single cells, such as enlargement of the nuclei; narrow-band imaging uses blue light to enhance an image.
The researchers found that pCLE was 91 percent accurate in detecting precancerous polyps and narrow-band imaging was 77 percent accurate, when compared to biopsy findings, according to the release.
“We are getting closer to where we want to be, which is 100 percent accurate,” Dr. Wallace said in the release. “Some day soon we will be able to use these probes to virtually biopsy a polyp, removing only those that could become cancerous.”
In the most recent study, which is published in the March issue of Gastroenterology, researchers administered a standard colonoscopy to 75 patients, and during the procedure used narrow-band imaging as well as pCLE to determine cancer risk in the polyps. In all, 119 polyps were removed from the patients and sent to pathologists for analysis; 81 polyps were precancerous and 38 were benign, according to the release. Both methods were equally specific, but the pCLE system was much more sensitive in detecting precancerous polyps.
The study was funded by an American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Research Award. Dr. Wallace receives research grant support from Mauna Kea Technologies.
Read the Mayo release on pCLE and narrow-band imaging.
