Ultraslim endoscopy with flexible spectral imaging color enhancement for upper gastrointestinal neoplasms

To conduct a preliminary study on the effect of flexible spectral imaging color enhancement (FICE) used in combination with ultraslim endoscopy by focusing on the enhanced contrast between tumor and non-tumor lesions.

We examined 50 lesions of 40 patients with epithelial tumors of the upper gastrointestinal tract before endoscopic submucosal dissection using ultraslim endoscopy with conventional natural color imaging and with FICE imaging. We retrospectively investigated the effect of the use of FICE on endoscopic diagnosis in comparison with normal light.

Visibility of the epithelial tumors of the upper gastrointestinal tract with FICE was superior to normal light in 54% of the observations and comparable to normal light in 46% of the observations. There was no lesion for which visibility with FICE was inferior to that with normal light. FICE visualized 69.6% of hyperemic lesions and 58.8% of discolored lesions better than conventional endoscopy with natural color imaging. FICE significantly improved the visibility of lesions with hyperemia or discoloration compared with normocolored lesions.

This study suggests that the use of FICE would improve the ability of ultraslim endoscopy to detect epithelial tumors of the upper gastrointestinal tract.