Low-cost, multimodal, portable screening system for early detection of oral cancer

Oral cancer is an important global health problem. There is an urgent need for improved methods to detect oral cancer and its precursors, because early detection is the best way to reduce oral cancer mortality and morbidity. In this work, we describe simple modifications to a surgical headlight system that enables direct visualization and digital image acquisition from oral tissue in multiple imaging modalities including fluorescence, white-light reflectance, and orthogonal polarization reflectance. Images obtained with the system in-vivo demonstrate that it is an attractive technology to explore for oral cancer screening in low-resource environments where clinical expertise is often unavailable.