Furthermore, the processing of signals can be carried out immediately with a personal computer, meaning the results are instantaneous and its application would thus decrease diagnostic waiting times.
According to the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC), around 12,200 cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed every year in Spain alone; and 357,000 worldwide. The incidence in our country is one of the highest in the world. It is the fourth most common tumour in men, after lung, prostate and colorectal, and it is the fifth most common tumour in men in developed countries. It is also a type of cancer that has a high relapse rate, which is why, after the removal of the tumour, the patient will be added to a monitoring protocol, which as standard, would include medical visits and tests every three months.
Cystoscopies and
urine cytology tests are currently the most frequently used tests for diagnosing and monitoring bladder cancer. However, on one hand, urine cytology tests have low sensitivity when detecting low grade tumours, and on the other, cystoscopies are invasive, have a high cost and its result is operator-dependent. Furthermore, cytology tests have limitations in differentiating between an inflammation and a malign lesion, and with the in situ diagnosing of carcinomas, which is a tumour with a high risk of progression.
"There are several trials that have received the approval of the FDA – Food and Drugs Administration of the United States – for their use in the diagnosis and monitoring of bladder cancer, but none of them improves the results of a cystoscopy," argues Javier Monreal, one of the authors of the project and doctoral student at the UPV. Alongside him working on the project are Mª Carmen Martínez Bisbal and Miguel Alcañiz Fillos, researchers at the Interuniversity Institute of Molecular Recognition and Technological Development (IDM) at the UPV, and Alberto Ferrer Riquelme, from the Group of Multivariate Statistics Engineering, GIEM.
"The preliminary results of this study, with a 75% accuracy rate, indicate that the shapes of current waveforms induced in urine through pulse voltammetry could allow, with an appropriate processing of the data, for a non-invasive diagnosis in the monitoring of patients with bladder cancer," highlights Mª Carmen Martínez Bisbal.
The UPV researchers presented this work in the framework of the XII International Workshop on Sensors and Molecular Recognition, held recently in the Higher Technical Design Engineering School (ETSID) of Spain.
MEDICA-tradefair.com; Source: Asociación RUVID