Portable colposcopy in low-resource settings

Screening for cervical dysplasia is an important public health effort worldwide. In unscreened populations, the incidence of cervical cancer ranges between 2 and 4% of the adult female population, whereas less than 0.1% of the screened population of Caucasian women has cervical cancer in the United States. In developing countries, cervical cytology is difficult to implement successfully because of the cost, cultural constraints, limited access to pathology services, etc. Bypassing cytology and going directly to colposcopy has been successfully implemented as a screening strategy for dysplasia in low resource settings. In this article we describe the development and utilization of a portable binocular colposcope that does not require electricity.