The improved colonoscope is to allow better detection of neoplastic changes in the large intestine without exposing the patient to unpleasantness – informs the EurekAlert service.
Colonoscopy is considered to be the most accurate method of detecting colorectal cancer – a cancer that is close to lung and breast cancer in terms of the number of deaths. Many patients could have been saved if cancer had been found sooner. If there have been no such cases in the family, the first examination should be performed after the age of XNUMX. If parents or siblings were ill, they must be performed after the age of forty.
The test is repeated every ten years (every five years when polyps are detected). Small polyps can be removed during the colonoscopy, right after detection.
However, this potentially life-saving procedure can be painful. The team of prof. Caroline GL Cao from Tufts University’s School of Engineering (USA) has developed a method that will simultaneously increase the accuracy of the research and reduce its burden for the patient.
The colonoscope is a long, flexible fiber optic sight glass, the end of which can be bent using appropriate cables. Sometimes, as it passes through the bends of the intestine, this tip painfully hits the walls of the intestine, bends and wedges, causing pain.
Such events are to be prevented by the EFOST technology developed at Tufts University. The endoscope is equipped with sensors that detect its bends and digital systems showing its position and shape on the monitor – so that the doctor operating the endoscope uses a kind of navigation system – immediately notices that the speculum is starting to warp and wedge.
At the heart of the enhanced endoscope are quantum dots – miniature semiconductor crystals that concentrically surround the optical fiber. The sets of dots are arranged at regular intervals along the optical fiber. As laser light passes through the fiber, each bend leads to light leakage, which causes the quantum cops to emit their own light – the stronger the greater the bend.
Using a quantum dot light-analyzing spectrometer to determine how much stress has occurred and where it has occurred, and a computer converts the numerical data into a clinician-readable endoscope orientation diagram.