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Standard endoscopic tools restrict clinicians to making subjective visual assessments of lesions detected in the bowel, with classification results depending strongly on experience level and training. Histological examination of resected tissue remains the diagnostic gold standard, meaning that all detected lesions are routinely removed. This subjects the patient to risk of polypectomy-related injury, and places significant workload and economic burdens on the hospital. An objective endoscopic classification method would allow hyperplastic polyps, with no malignant potential, to be left in situ, or low grade adenomas to be resected and discarded without histology. A miniature multimodal flexible endoscope is proposed to obtain hyperspectral reflectance and dual excitation autofluorescence information from polyps in vivo. This is placed inside the working channel of a conventional colonoscope, with the external scanning and detection optics on a bedside trolley. A blue and violet laser diode pair excite endogenous fluorophores in the respiration chain, while the colonoscope's xenon light source provides broadband white light for diffuse reflectance measurements. A push-broom HSI scanner collects the hypercube. System characterisation experiments are presented, defining resolution limits as well as acquisition settings for optimal spectral, spatial and temporal performance. The first in vivo results in human subjects are presented, demonstrating the clinical utility of the device. The optical properties (reflectance and autofluorescence) of imaged polyps are quantified and compared to the histologically-confirmed tissue type as well as the clinician’s visual assessment. Further clinical studies will allow construction of a full robust training dataset for development of classification schemes.
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