DYSIS – A Revolutionary Approach for Cervical Cancer

The DYSIS (Dynamic Spectral Imaging System) digital colposcope measures and maps cervical pre-cancers, eliminating the subjectivity of conventional colposcopy and significantly increasing the detection rate for cervical lesions.

Cervical cancer kills more than 288,000 women each year worldwide¹ and affects almost double.  According to the World Health Organization, ‘cervical cancer can be readily prevented, even in women at high risk for the disease, through screening and treatment using relatively simple technologies. When precancerous changes in cervical tissue are found and the abnormal tissue successfully treated, a woman will not develop cancer’.

However clinical evidence in the EU shows that with conventional colposcopy as much as 51 per cent of patients with high grade cervical cancer can be missed. With DYSIS this figure was reduced to just 21 per cent². Other clinical tests have shown DYSIS to be 88 per cent sensitive compared to 55 per cent for conventional colposcopy³.

The new DYSIS digital colposcope is, quite literally, a life saver. It provides clinicians with much more accurate information from which to make a diagnosis than conventional colposcopy. The results are better care for patients with reduced medical risks caused by inaccurate or uncertain diagnosis. Clinicians develop greater expertise in diagnosis too. Having used DYSIS Professor Vesna Kesic, Belgrade, Serbia & President Elect of the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology says: : “DYSIS showed to be very useful in discriminating between high-grade neoplasia and low-grade non-neoplastic changes on the cervix. Help in predicting the severity of the lesion and guiding to biopsy will be appreciated even by experienced colposcopists. In my opinion, the main practical value of DYSIS will be in improving the specificity of colposcopy by quantative assessment and mapping of atypical findings on the cervix, thus decreasing false positive findings and unnecessary treatment”.

For patients, the DYSIS digital colposcope offers many advantages compared to conventional colposcopy and should not cause pain or discomfort. An examination takes only about three minutes and DYSIS is used by a Gynaecologist in a similar way to a colposcope. Instead the clinician will put a number of different solutions on the cervix and look for changes that indicate the presence or otherwise of changes to the cells. The new DYSIS digital colposcope works with all examination beds and chairs and can be set-up and used for either right or left-handed operation.

More than 50 DYSIS are already in use around the world and the system is available now in 24 countries. Stuart Rogers, Sales and Marketing Director, DYSISmedical, says: “DYSIS will greatly increase the early detection of cervical cancer – this has been proved not only in clinical trials but in hospitals and gynaecology clinics across the globe. DYSIS can now be purchased through our distributors in 24 countries.”

To introduce the new DYSIS digital colposcope to a broad audience of clinicians, the team at DYSIS Medical will attend a number of high profile colposcopy and gynaecology meetings and conferences from now until October 2012. This includes events in the USA, the UK, Canada, Italy, Greece and the Czech Republic.

ENDS

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References

1 World Health Organization. http://screening.iarc.fr/cervicalindex.php (accessed September 2011)

2 Soutter et all, CCR 2009

Link to journal:

http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/15/5/1814

3 Dynamic Spectral Imaging Colposcopy: Higher sensitivity for detection of premalignant cervical lesions – Louwers et al, BJOG, 2011

Notes to editors

DYSISmedical is a medical device company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets imaging systems that facilitate the non-invasive, in-vivo detection of cancerous and pre-cancerous lesions. DYSISmedical assists medical practitioners to improve patient care by incorporating advanced biophotonics and optical molecular imaging technologies that assist in early detection, diagnosis and monitoring.

The new DYSIS digital colposcope took 10 years to develop and began with the DYSISmedical R&D team continuing pioneering research by the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas. They worked on the imaging of cervical neoplasia using acetic acid as a biomarker. This was allied to dynamic spectral imaging platform technology to provide information-rich diagnostic signals – with more than 120,000 pixels used to image one square millimetre of tissue.

DYSIS measures the acetowhitening phenomenon which, when modelled and analysed, enables the calculation of dynamic parameters expressing the marker-tissue interaction kinetics for every image pixel. Laboratory and clinical studies have shown that the obtained kinetic data are correlated with the rate, extent and duration of acetowhitening, helping the clinician to differentiate between neoplastic and non-neoplastic lesions as well as between neoplasias of different grades.

The spatial distribution of these parameters comprises the dynamic map, which can be overlaid onto the colour image of the tissue. This data assists the in vivo detection, mapping and grading of the lesion for diagnosis, screening and follow up, while simultaneously enabling the on-line guidance of biopsy sampling and surgical treatment.