Gastric mucosa analysis using speckle patterns: a medical diagnosis alternative

Speckle techniques have been extensively employed in biomedical applications. It has been shown, that these non invasive optical techniques are useful to discriminate healthy tissues from those presenting some type of pathology. In this work we analyze speckle patterns from histological samples of gastric mucosa obtained by means of digestive endoscopies with three different histopathological confirmed diagnoses: atrophy, metaplasia and dysplasia. We studied biopsies from 27 patients and formed groups following the corresponding speckle contrast features. Three different groups according to the speckle contrast were established: higher for intestinal metaplasia, intermediate for gastric dysplasia and low for gastric atrophy. The comparison with histopathology shows a high value of concordance between both tests, making this methodology emerges as a possible new classification system for qualitative and quantitative gastric biopsy using optical techniques.