The study found that the pCLE was 91 percent accurate in detecting precancerous polyps, while narrow-band imaging was 77 percent accurate, when compared to biopsy findings. 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.
Currently, all colon polpys detected during colonoscopy are removed for biopsy, and half of these polpys are determined to be benign. Because removing benign polyps adds extra time and expense, researchers are hoping to one day find a way to determine if polyps are cancerous before removal.
“We are getting closer to where we want to be, which is 100 percent accurate,” the study’s senior author, Michael Wallace, MD, MPH, professor of medicine at the College of Medicine at Florida’s Mayo Clinic , 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 this study, researchers administered a standard colonoscopy to 75 patients, and used narrow-band imaging and pCLE during the procedure to determine cancer risk in the polyps. In all, 119 polyps were removed from the patients and sent to pathologists for analysis. Eighty-one polyps were precancerous and 38 were benign. Both methods were equally specific, meaning that they had the same ability to detect benign polyps, but the pCLE system was much more sensitive in detecting precancerous polyps.
Read the Mayo Clinic’s release on colonoscopy probes.
