Preliminary clinical study of the potential of multi-modal optical/ultrasound LUCA platform for improved thyroid cancer screening

The LUCA device combines clinical ultrasound, time-domain near infrared and diffuse correlation spectroscopies with the aim of improving thyroid cancer screening sensitivity and specificity. The preliminary clinical campaign on patients (n=31) with thyroid nodules and healthy controls (n=11) allowed the characterization of the precision of the instrument and demonstrated that using a couple of biomarkers the muscle-to-nodule contrast allows an area under the curve of 0.92 for single-nodule patients and 0.77 for all patients in differentiating benign and malignant nodules in a receiver operating characteristic curve. We will present the updated results from the ongoing study.