Colorectal cancer is the third most common cause of cancer death in the United States and affects nearly 148,000 Americans annually.
Routine screening utilizing colonoscopy has lowered mortality from colon cancer. The current standard of care is to resect lesions also known as “colon polyps” and submit them for pathologic analysis to determine neoplastic potential. It has been estimated that if pathologic analysis is not needed, it could lead to a savings of over $4.3 billion in the United States alone. The current strategy for providing optical diagnosis utilizes the difference in the surface pattern of vessels and pits and optical filters to provide adequate contrast.
However, these techniques are not able to provide an accurate enough assessment and require training of endoscopists which has prevented its wide-scale use. We plan to provide in vivo real-time blood flow determination for optical diagnosis without any need for special training or equipment with similar or better accuracy so that this can be widely implemented. We plan to use proprietary technology to analyze video recorded (for the initial phase) with standard endoscopic equipment and then use proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to process this information and represent the neoplastic areas using a color code.
Once fully developed, this technology will be implemented using existing and commonly used endoscopic equipment and will provide instantaneous in vivo optical pathology of such lesions to help guide management such as the need for resection and malignant potential etc.