A novel intelligent chromo capsule endoscope for the diagnosis of neoplastic lesions in the gastrointestinal tract.

Background: Chromoendoscopy has not been fully integrated into capsule endoscopy. This study aimded to develop and validate a novel intelligent chromo capsule endoscope (ICCE). Methods: The ICCE has two modes: a white-light imaging (WLI) mode and an intelligent chromo imaging (ICI) mode. The performance of the ICCE in observing colors, animal tissues, and early gastrointestinal (GI) neoplastic lesions in humans was evaluated. Images captured by the ICCE were analysed using variance of Laplacian (VoL) values or image contrast evaluation. Results: For color observation, conventional narrow-band imaging endoscopes and the ICI mode of the ICCE have similar spectral distributions. Compared with the WLI mode, the ICI mode had significantly higher VoL values for animal tissues (2.154 ± 1.044 vs 3.800 ± 1.491, P = 0.003), gastric precancerous lesions and early gastric cancers (2.242 ± 0.162 vs 6.642 ± 0.919, P < 0.001), and colon tumors (3.896 ± 1.430 vs 11.882 ± 7.663, P < 0.001), and significantly higher contrast for differentiating tumor and non-tumor areas (0.069 ± 0.046 vs 0.144 ± 0.076, P = 0.005). More importantly, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the ICI mode for early GI tumors were 95.83%, 91.67%, and 94.64%, respectively, which were significantly higher than the values of the WLI mode (78.33% [P < 0.001], 77.08% [P = 0.01], and 77.98% [P < 0.001], respectively). Conclusions: We successfully integrated ICI into the capsule endoscope. The ICCE is an innovative and useful tool for differential diagnosis based on contrast-enhanced images and thus has great potential as a superior diagnostic tool for early GI tumor detection.

Novel scheme for non-invasive gut bioinformation acquisition with a magnetically controlled sampling capsule endoscope.

OBJECTIVE: Intestinal flora and metabolites are associated with multiple systemic diseases. Current approaches for acquiring information regarding microbiota/metabolites have limitations. We aimed to develop a precise magnetically controlled sampling capsule endoscope (MSCE) for the convenient, non-invasive and accurate acquisition of digestive bioinformation for disease diagnosis and evaluation. DESIGN: The MSCE and surgery were both used for sampling both jejunal and ileal GI content in the control and antibiotic-induced diarrhoea groups. The GI content was then used for microbiome profiling and metabolomics profiling. RESULTS: Compared with surgery, our data showed that the MSCE precisely acquired data regarding the intestinal flora and metabolites, which was effectively differentiated in different intestinal regions and disease models. Using MSCE, we detected a dramatic decrease in the abundance of Bacteroidetes, Patescibacteria and Actinobacteria and hippuric acid levels, as well as an increase in the abundance of Escherichia-Shigella and the 2-pyrrolidinone levels were detected in the antibiotic-induced diarrhoea model by MSCE. MSCE-mediated sampling revealed specific gut microbiota/metabolites including Enterococcus, Lachnospiraceae, acetyl-L-carnitine and succinic acid, which are related to metabolic diseases, cancers and nervous system disorders. Additionally, the MSCE exhibited good sealing characteristics with no contamination after sampling. CONCLUSIONS: We present a newly developed MSCE that can non-invasively and accurately acquire intestinal bioinformation via direct visualization under magnetic control, which may further aid in disease prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.

Spectral unmixing method for multi-pixel energy dispersive x-ray diffraction systems.

An algorithm of spectral unmixing (SU) is presented, allowing the improvement of material classification accuracy based on the low spatial resolution images obtained by multi-pixel energy dispersive x-ray diffraction (EDXRD) systems. The method, which consists of signal subspace identification and endmember extraction, performs well even when the pixel count is rather small. Combined with SU, EDXRD has been utilized for liquid security screening for the first time. The spectra and abundance distributions of endmembers are extracted from the measured data sets corresponding to objects of different material composition, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.

Determination of liquid's molecular interference function based on X-ray diffraction and dual-energy CT in security screening.

A method for deriving the molecular interference function (MIF) of an unknown liquid for security screening is presented. Based on the effective atomic number reconstructed from dual-energy computed tomography (CT), equivalent molecular formula of the liquid is estimated. After a series of optimizations, the MIF and a new effective atomic number are finally obtained from the X-ray diffraction (XRD) profile. The proposed method generates more accurate results with less sensitivity to the noise and data deficiency of the XRD profile.