New device for ‘hard to detect’ cancers

A clever new device could change bowel cancer pathways in the UK forever. By enhancing early detection of disease, and reducing costs of unnecessary investigations into benign disease, it will support NHS goals to create diagnostic hubs in the community.

In the UK, as many as 4 in 10 people at any one time experience symptoms of digestive disorder, and up to 20% of GP patients will have experienced rectal bleeding within the past year. Currently FIT testing – which detects the presence of blood in stool samples – is the main way of triaging patients for hospital referral.

However, on average, only about 9 in 100 people who have an endoscopy (after an abnormal FIT result) will be found to have a cancer meaning there is a backlog of hospital appointments and increasing wait times at hospitals when an accurate procedure can be done in a GP surgery instead.

The LuCID study – looking at the efficiency of the new LumenEye X1 device – involved 11 UK hospital NHS trusts, and GP surgeries, including Imperial College London, King’s College London, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust and NHS Forth Valley in Scotland.

Ryan spoke to Julie Harrington from Guts UK.