In last Autumn’s edition of Gastroenterology Today, we commenced a short series of articles looking at how new technologies could replace endoscopy to achieve quicker and cheaper diagnoses. This is a key requirement at the present time given the impact of Covid on diagnostic as well as treatment waiting times. Indeed, the latest NHS England statistics for December 2020 show that, compared to December 2019, the diagnostic test type with the largest increase in the proportion of patients waiting six weeks or more was Endoscopy, with an increase of 38.7 percentage points.
New technologies have a clear role to play in delivering faster and more efficient diagnoses. In the Autumn issue our focus was on transnasal endoscopy, a technology that can be deployed safely and easily in hospital settings, delivering the early diagnoses needed to drive the best positive outcomes for gastrointestinal tract diseases while keeping patients and surgical teams separate from hospital red zones.
In this edition we consider the use of cytosponge for the detection and risk stratification of Barrett’s oesophagus.
