Health Advocacy and Training Perceptions: a Comparison of Medical Student Opinions.

Background: The American Medical Association considers health advocacy to be a core aspect of a physician's responsibility, which has sparked medical schools to institutionalize training. However, there is little information regarding student perspectives on advocacy education.

Purpose: To evaluate medical student opinions on advocacy education and to determine similarities and differences across classes.

Towards monitoring dysplastic progression in the oral cavity using a hybrid fiber-bundle imaging and spectroscopy probe.

Intraepithelial dysplasia of the oral mucosa typically originates in the proliferative cell layer at the basement membrane and extends to the upper epithelial layers as the disease progresses. Detection of malignancies typically occurs upon visual inspection by non-specialists at a late-stage. In this manuscript, we validate a quantitative hybrid imaging and spectroscopy microendoscope to monitor dysplastic progression within the oral cavity microenvironment in a phantom and pre-clinical study.

Fiber-bundle microendoscopy with sub-diffuse reflectance spectroscopy and intensity mapping for multimodal optical biopsy of stratified epithelium.

Early detection of structural or functional changes in dysplastic epithelia may be crucial for improving long-term patient care. Recent work has explored myriad non-invasive or minimally invasive "optical biopsy" techniques for diagnosing early dysplasia, such as high-resolution microendoscopy, a method to resolve sub-cellular features of apical epithelia, as well as broadband sub-diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, a method that evaluates bulk health of a small volume of tissue. We present a multimodal fiber-based microendoscopy technique that combines high-resolution microendoscopy, broadband (450-750 nm) sub-diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (sDRS) at two discrete source-detector separations (374 and 730 μm), and sub-diffuse reflectance intensity mapping (sDRIM) using a 635 nm laser.