Rapid endoscopic identification and destruction of degenerating Barrett's mucosal neoplasia.

There are distinct challenges implicit to the development of minimally invasive endoscopic surgery for the eradication of early neoplasia in Barrett's oesophagus. Endoscopic resection and ablation of high-grade dysplasia and mucosal cancer offer alternative therapeutic options to those unsuitable or unwilling to contemplate radical surgical excision. It may also become the treatment of choice in the future.

Vibrational spectroscopy: a clinical tool for cancer diagnostics.

Vibrational spectroscopy techniques have demonstrated potential to provide non-destructive, rapid, clinically relevant diagnostic information. Early detection is the most important factor in the prevention of cancer. Raman and infrared spectroscopy enable the biochemical signatures from biological tissues to be extracted and analysed.

Towards automated classification of clinical optical coherence tomography data of dense tissues.

The native contrast of optical coherence tomography (OCT) data in dense tissues can pose a challenge for clinical decision making. Automated data evaluation is one way of enhancing the clinical utility of measurements. Methods for extracting information from structural OCT data are appraised here.

Near real-time classification of optical coherence tomography data using principal components fed linear discriminant analysis.

An optical coherence tomography (OCT) prediction algorithm is designed and tested on a data set of sample images (taken from vegetables and porcine tissues) to demonstrate proof of concept. Preprocessing and classification of data are fully automated, at a rate of 60,000 A-scansmin on a standard computer and can be considered to deliver in near real-time. A data set consisting of nine groups was classified correctly in 82% of cases after cross-validation.

Endoscopic screening and surveillance for Barrett's esophagus--clinical implications.

There is now a clear causal relationship between symptomatic gastroesophageal reflux and esophageal adenocarcinoma (Lagergren et al, 1999). The risk factor is now identified as Barrett's metaplasia (Solaymani et al, 2004). Chronic reflux results in Barrett's metaplastic change, and the route to carcinoma is a stepwise progression, through dysplasia to invasive carcinoma (Jankowski et al, 2000).

Endoscopic photodynamic therapy for oesophageal disease.

Photodynamic therapy is a very important technique for the eradication of widespread oesophageal mucosal disease which has the potential to degenerate to cancer. Patients unsuitable or unwilling to undergo radical therapy can be cured using photodynamic therapy. We predominantly treat patients with high-grade dysplasia in Barrett's oesophagus.