Kolkata hospital uses French tech for optical biopsy

The cellvizio technology for doing optical biopsy, which weeds out chances of inaccuracies in the probe, has now been launched in India.

Apollo Gleneagles in Kolkata became the first hospital in the country to use the world’s smallest device for optical biopsy using French technology.

Cellvizio technology, a product of Mauna Kea Technologies, is a probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy system that provides physicians and researchers high-resolution cellular views of tissue inside the body.

Dr Mahesh Goenka of Apollo hospital, the first doctor in India to use the technology, said with Cellvizio, a microscope is threaded through an endoscope to enable physicians to see real-time what normally is seen under a microscope.

Cellvizio magnifies the tissue up to a thousand times providing physicians additional real-time information about the tissue microstructure.

Dr Goenka said physical biopsies are often inaccurate as sampling errors are reported in millions of cases while optical biopsies rule that out.

The cellvizio technology can be used to assess tissue both in the digestive system as well as the pulmonary tract. Until now, this hasn’t been always possible with traditional endoscopic imaging technologies.

Benign, pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions are often indistinguishable from each other upon endoscopy unless viewed at the cellular level.