|
CANCER APPLICATIONS
Skin Cancer Diagnosis Market
CancerScanner™ can easily diagnose skin cancer tumors by
scanning the tissue area being examined and its margin. The
diagnostic procedure does not cause pain, bleeding, or scarring.
CancerScanner™ can scan the entire tissue area in few minutes.
CancerScanner™ has the potential to eliminate unnecessary
biopsies, reduce the probability of missing lesions especially
in the margins and be adjunct to biopsies in diagnosing
malignancy. Therefore the Company technology shall reduce the
health-care costs in skin cancer diagnosis and provide greater
quality/comfort in treatment of the patients.
HMO's like to pay for screenings such as Pap smears,
mammograms and vaccinations because they are very inexpensive
and make for very good publicity. However skin cancer screening
costs much more:
Types of skin cancer treatments and
their physician costs:
Type of Treatment
|
Completion time
|
Charge
|
Scrape and Burn
|
5 minutes
|
$100
|
Deep Freezing
|
1.5 minutes
|
$100
|
Interferon Inject
|
1 minute
|
$ 12
|
Routine Injection
|
15-30 minutes
|
$175
|
Mohs without "Sew"
|
30-100 minutes
|
$325
|
Mohs with "Sew"
|
60-200 minutes
|
$700
|
HMO's may work in several ways. A doctor may sign up to care
for 50,000 covered insured patients annually for a flat fee, say
$40,000 per year for the whole lot. (That's 50,000 people on a
particular plan like some of Humana's.) That's 80 cents per
person. If most or many patients show up, the doctor will go
broke seeing them all, especially if most need a treatment of
some kind. It is possible that the doctor isn't going to want to
do anything complicated or time-consuming for a patient, if it
can be avoided. Since skin cancer does not usually return for
several years following a failed treatment, it is clear that
freezing, scraping and applying a cream will be high on the list
of treatments an HMO doctor may use.
Because of the reasons mentioned above, an adequate, in other
words excisional, biopsy is necessary for diagnosis. Many
medical textbooks/doctors feel that all moles should be excised
with a 2-3 mm margin (area around them). Many authorities feel
that most basal-cell cancers can be removed with 90% confidence
or 10% risk of failure by taking 3mm (1/8 of an inch) of normal
tissue around the clinically visible basal-cell cancer. Some
newer studies suggest that squamous-cell skin cancer may require
a 5 mm border of normal tissue excised in order to be assured of
the cure at least 95% of the time (meaning about 5% will be
missed) .
Removing a mole and its margin from skin may cause scarring.
Some patients are not willing to go through biopsies to avoid
scars, especially if the biopsy is taken on their faces. If a
scar is too deep, plastic surgery might be required. Other
adverse effects of biopsies include bleeding and infection.
A.2 Potential Applications of CancerScanner technology
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer today affecting
over 1,5 million Americans annually. Currently, the majority of
skin cancers are confirmed using an invasive biopsy after which
they are treated surgically. Merely 20 percent of the biopsies
performed however diagnose a malignancy.
Cervical Cancer Diagnosis Market
CancerScanner™ scans cervical tissue rapidly and accurately
pinpoints locations of specific pathologies, including dysplasia,
which is not visible to the naked eye. Therefore, CancerScanner™
has the potential to replace (or serve as an adjunct) Pap smears
and colposcopies. It has also potential to resolve ASCUS by
detecting cancerous cells with very low grades. Improved and
earlier detection will also eliminate unnecessary biopsies.
SpectraPath's technology has the potential to be used as adjunct
to biopsy. Screening and diagnosis of cervical cancer is an
ideal arena for the entry of bio-optical techniques for cancer
detection. The tissue is easily accessible and the Papanicolaou
technique (Pap smear), the standard technique in cervical cancer
diagnosis, has a number of drawbacks including both false
negatives and false positives.
Pap smears can miss as many as 20% of precancerous and
cancerous lesions . According to another analysis, false
negative rates for Pap smears range from 34-63 percent, mainly
due to inadequacies of sampling, inadequacies of slide
preparation, and processing problems (diagnosis subjectivity).
According to estimates from the US National Cancer Institute
(NCI), inconclusive results with Pap Smears create the need for
additional testing, and patient care, costing the medical system
$3.6 billion annually.
Unfortunately, Pap smear follow-up procedures share many
similar shortcomings affecting the initial test. Follow up
procedures include a combination of colposcopy, a biopsy of
suspected lesions, and ASCUS (Atypical Squamous Cells of Unknown
Significance).
Published studies indicate that up to 50% of colposcopies
result in false positives and up to 25% of high-grade disease is
misclassified as low grade. Biopsies are also subject to error.
Biopsies that miss the targeted lesion or that are too small for
proper pathological diagnoses are among the reasons for a
well-documented false negative rate of 15% or higher25.
As a result, current clinical management of cervical cancer
leads to US health care spending of $8.8 billion annually, much
of which is caused by inaccurate screening procedures.
US Cervical Cancer Diagnosis Market,
2001.
|
