Seminair: Wide-field endomicroscopic imaging using OCT for improved management of gastrointestinal tract diseases

Michalina GORA, instructor at Harvard Medical School and assistant physicist in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, will present his research Wednesday April 23th 2014 at 2.00pm in the lecture hall room Léon Hirsch at IRCAD.

Title: Wide-field endomicroscopic imaging using OCT for improved management of gastrointestinal tract diseases

Abstract: Gastrointestinal (GI) cancer including esophageal, stomach and colon cancer is the second most common cause of death in Europe.  Because treatment of early stage cancer in GI can be curative, medical societies recommend that people over the age of 50 should be screened.
Videoendoscopy with subsequent random biopsy is a current standard of care for gastrointestinal tract diagnosing. Even though endoscopy has significantly improved health care outcomes, it has inefficiencies like low accuracy, requirement to of sedation and sampling error in during random biopsy that limit its impact.
A new technology, termed tethered capsule endomicroscopy that implements optical coherence tomography (OCT) in a swallowable capsule format having potential to overcome the limitations of conventional endoscopy for upper GI screening will be presented. The device is a small pill that contains optics acquiring microscopic OCT images of the luminal digestive tract as it travels down the esophagus after it has been swallowed. The three-dimensional, microstructural images of the human upper GI in vivo were obtained in a simple and painless procedure without the need of patient sedation or endoscopy assistance.

Bio: Michalina J. Gora is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and an assistant physicist in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She received her doctoral degree in the Physics Department of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. Her thesis was focused on the development of noninvasive imaging methods for comprehensive imaging of the human eye. Her current research is focused on application of optical coherence tomography OCT for imaging of human gastrointestinal tract. She has developed and fabricated a novel tethered capsule catheter that allows unsedated imaging of the whole human esophagus and duodenum. She is leading the first in human clinical studies to test feasibility and efficacy of this technology.