Open AccessPortable, handheld, and affordable blood perfusion imager for screening of subsurface cancer in resource-limited settings
Author(s) -
Arka Bhowmik,
Biswajoy Ghosh,
Mousumi Pal,
Ranjan Rashmi Paul,
Jyotirmoy Chatterjee,
Suman Chakraborty
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.011
H-Index - 771
eISSN - 1091-6490
pISSN - 0027-8424
DOI - 10.1073/pnas.2026201119
Subject(s) - medicine , perfusion , biopsy , cancer , gold standard (test) , pathology , radiology , computer science , medical physics
Significance Existing procedures of screening subsurface cancers are either prohibitively resource-intensive and expensive or are unable to provide direct quantitative estimates of the relevant physiological parameters for accurate classification accommodating interpatient variabilities and overlapping clinical manifestations. Here, we introduce a handheld and inexpensive blood perfusion imager that provides a noninvasive in situ screening approach for distinguishing precancer, cancer, and normal scenarios by precise quantitative estimation of the localized blood circulation in the tissue over an unrestricted region of interest without any unwarranted noise in the data, augmented by machine learning–based classification. Clinical trials in minimally resourced settings have established the efficacy of the method in differentiating cancerous and precancerous stages of suspected oral abnormalities, as verified by gold-standard biopsy reports.