Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34983869›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022

Portable, handheld, and affordable blood perfusion imager for screening of subsurface cancer in resource-limited settings.

Arka Bhowmik, Biswajoy Ghosh, Mousumi Pal, Ranjan Rashmi Paul, Jyotirmoy Chatterjee, Suman Chakraborty

Open access · hybridAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
10citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
2.3field-weighted citation impact, top 12% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 17 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Review
  3. Signaling pathways and targeted interventions for precancers.Signal transduction and targeted therapy · 2026
    Review
  4. Infrared thermography in clinical practice: a literature review.European journal of medical research · 2025
    Review
  5. Review
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Review
  9. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Arka BhowmikSchool of Medical Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India.ORCID 0000-0001-5177-969X
Biswajoy GhoshSchool of Medical Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India.
Mousumi PalDepartment of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Guru Nanak Institute of Dental Science and Research, Kolkata 700114, India.
Ranjan Rashmi PaulDepartment of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Guru Nanak Institute of Dental Science and Research, Kolkata 700114, India.
Jyotirmoy ChatterjeeSchool of Medical Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India.
Suman ChakrabortyDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India suman@mech.iitkgp.ac.in.
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur · IN

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Precise information on localized variations in blood circulation holds the key for noninvasive diagnostics and therapeutic assessment of various forms of cancer. While thermal imaging by itself may provide significant insights on the combined implications of the relevant physiological parameters, viz. local blood perfusion and metabolic balance due to active tumors as well as the ambient conditions, knowledge of the tissue surface temperature alone may be somewhat inadequate in distinguishing between some ambiguous manifestations of precancer and cancerous lesions, resulting in compromise of the selectivity in detection. This, along with the lack of availability of a user-friendly and inexpensive portable device for thermal-image acquisition, blood perfusion mapping, and data integration acts as a deterrent against the emergence of an inexpensive, contact-free, and accurate in situ screening and diagnostic approach for cancer detection and management. Circumventing these constraints, here we report a portable noninvasive blood perfusion imager augmented with machine learning-based quantitative analytics for screening precancerous and cancerous traits in oral lesions, by probing the localized alterations in microcirculation. With a proven overall sensitivity >96.66% and specificity of 100% as compared to gold-standard biopsy-based tests, the method successfully classified oral cancer and precancer in a resource-limited clinical setting in a double-blinded patient trial and exhibited favorable predictive capabilities considering other complementary modes of medical image analysis as well. The method holds further potential to achieve contrast-free, accurate, and low-cost diagnosis of abnormal microvascular physiology and other clinically vulnerable conditions, when interpreted along with complementary clinically evidenced decision-making perspectives.

Indexed as

AdultAged, 80 and overAlgorithmsBiopsyDiagnostic ImagingEarly Detection of CancerHumansImage Processing, Computer-AssistedMachine LearningMaleMass ScreeningMiddle AgedMouth NeoplasmsPerfusionSquamous Cell Carcinoma of Head and Neckblood perfusion sensorcancer screeningresource-limited setting

Identifiers

PMID34983869
PMCPMC8764675
OpenAlexW4206310447

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.