I-Scan a Novel Endoscopic Tool for the Macroscopic Identification of Mucosal Lesions

The use of endoscopy for the diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases has continued to increase in recent years. Endoscopy provides an advantage over other noninvasive or minimally invasive procedures in that it allows both direct visualisation of the mucosa but direct and accurate sampling of abnormalities for histological examination. However standard endoscopy does have some limitations particularly with small lesions and pan mucosal changes. Some lesions may be entirely benign and require no further intervention but as a result of difficulty with accurate endoscopic characterization of lesions in many cases unnecessary biopsies or polypectomies are undertaken. Therefore any technology that can augment the use of standard endoscopy to minimise unnecessary intervention should be encouraged. IScan is a digital enhancement technique available with Pentax endoscopes. There have been other novel endoscopic advances for example, Narrow band imaging but these have not been adopted widely for a number of reasons including technical difficulties or patient tolerability. The aim of this study is to assess whether Pentax IScan technology is a reliable method of improving our recognition of macroscopic mucosal lesions compared to standard white light endoscopy