LIFE Bronchoscopy

In 1996 LIFE Bronchoscopy was approved by the FDA as a diagnostic tool for patients with lung cancer.  Recently it has been brought up to GMP standards and is being regulary used at the UCLA campus.  This tool has become very useful in detecting early stage lung cancers in the airway.  Unlike normal bronchoscopy which is performed under white light, the LIFE bronchoscopy uses fluorescence from the imaging system to detect abnormal cells.  The cancerous tissue will appear darker than the normal tissue and is easier to detect than with a normal bronchoscopy.  Blue light illuminates the tissues and excites fluorophors naturally present in the cancerous tissue.  The article I chose isn't necessarily a new design or thought regarding detection but it interested me because this is what I was doing in lab with Dr. Akabani last semester.  Although I wasn't performing bronchoschopies on patients with potential lung cancer, I was learning how to use a flow cytometer and a small fluorescence machine.  We started using the fluorescence machine on the sample brain cancer cells.  We dyed their nucleuses and other organells in the cell to analyze what they looked like on the machine.  Unfortuantely ( but still fortunately ) I came to Germany when we started to use the machine more in the lab.  I'm looking forward to maybe returning in the fall and knowing that the same technology used in th small machine we used to look at a nucleus is also being used to detect early onsets of lung cancer.