Highly Fluorescent Macrophages in Colonic Mucosa Under Autofluorescence Imaging Endoscopy: A Brief Case Report

Autofluorescence imaging (AFI) endoscopy for detection of early neoplastic lesions has recently received considerable attention in the field of clinical gastroenterology (van den Broek et al., 2008; Matsuda et al., 2008; Inoue et al., 2010). The main source of autofluorescence eruption under blue light excitation has been considered to be submucosal collagen, not the mucosal layer in human (Izuishi et al., 1999; Huang et al., 2004). In this report, we describe a rare case in which highly fluorescent mucosal macrophages made a superficial-type colonic adenoma remarkably easy to detect. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no case report documenting that the mucosal macrophages are the main contributors to colonic autofluorescence detected at autofluorescence colonoscopy.