Combining field imaging endoscopy with point analysis spectroscopy for improving early lung cancer detection

We propose to combine field imaging endoscopy with point spectral analysis for improving the overall diagnostic accuracy in clinical lung cancer detection. For this purpose, we developed an integrated endoscopy system that uses autofluorescence imaging and white light reflectance imaging to obtain high diagnostic sensitivity, while at the same time uses non-contact point reflectance/fluorescence spectroscopy to reduce false positive biopsies, thus, achieve high diagnostic specificity. A pilot clinical test on 22 lung patients demonstrated that using this system the malignant lung lesions can be differentiated from the benign lesions with both diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of better than 80%. To further reduce the number of false positive diagnosis and allow even higher diagnostic accuracies, we have also developed an endoscopic laser Raman probe for in vivo real-time biochemical analysis of the suspicious tissue areas identified by the field imaging modalities (white light imaging and autofluorescence imaging). Preliminary Raman spectroscopy results will be reported at the conference.