Development of a Hyperspectral Colposcope for Early Detection and Assessment of Cervical Dysplasia

The early detection of precancerous cervical lesions is essential to improve patient treatment and prognosis. Current methods of screening and diagnosis have improved the detection of these lesions but still present some critical limitations. Hyperspectral (HS) imaging is emerging as a new non-invasive and label-free imaging technique in the medical field for performing quick diagnosis of different diseases. This work describes the first step in the research and development process to present to the gynaecologist a new non-invasive tool to detect cervical neoplasia during routine medical procedures. This tool is based on a HS camera coupled to a colposcope, a primary tool already used in cervical examinations. The developed HS colposcope was validated by comparing the HS images obtained against the captures obtained with conventional optics. Results show the feasibility of the developed system to start a data acquisition campaign of cervical lesions targeting future developments of algorithms based on artificial intelligence.