Interventional technology firm Cook Medical is touting a study that suggests a new large-core biopsy needle used with an endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) scope can aid pathologists in diagnosing multiple types of cancers in various target tissues with a high degree of accuracy.
Researchers from University Hospital of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and four other healthcare institutions presented results of a study at the 2011 Digestive Disease Week conference, held last month in Chicago. They reported that the study's participants had a diagnostic accuracy of more than 85% when performing an EUS-guided biopsy for histopathology diagnosis of intra- and extraintestinal mass lesions in a consecutive series of 109 patients with 114 intestinal lesions and/or peri-intestinal lymph nodes.
Cook's 19-gauge EchoTip ProCore high-definition ultrasound biopsy needle enabled pathologists to sample a variety of lesions without compromising diagnostic accuracy, a capability that could lead to earlier detection of gastrointestinal malignancies, according to Dr. Julio Iglesias-Garcia, an associate faculty member of the University Hospital's gastroenterology department.
EUS with fine-needle aspiration is an established procedure for diagnosing gastrointestinal cancers and determining the stage of their development, but can procure only a cytological sample. The larger needle circumvents this limitation by obtaining intact tissue samples, allowing for histological diagnosis rather than conventional cytological diagnosis based on individual cells, according to Iglesias-Garcia.
The needles are also designed to access difficult-to-reach tissue in areas of the gastrointestinal tract such as the pancreatic head.
The researchers reported that overall accuracy for detecting malignancy was 92%.
