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Scinvivo is a medtech startup fully focused on improving the quality of life of bladder cancer patients by improving the current bladder cancer diagnostics and treatment. To achieve this, we are developing an optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging catheter, which allows the urologist to look up to 3 mm inside the tissue of the bladder wall. The catheter fits in the working channel of a cystoscope, and if the urologist sees something suspicious on the cystoscopy image s/he can insert the catheter and get a cross-sectional image at the point of interest (real time). Reading the guidelines, we've found that Bladder Cancer diagnostics boils down to getting insight into the bladder wall structure to determine the type of tissue and the stage of the tumor growth. With the diagnostic tools currently available this is impossible. Within the current bladder cancer carepath we’ve identified two main “unmet needs” for which our forward-looking OCT-catheter provides the solution:
differentiating between non-invasive and muscle-invasive bladder cancer as early as possible in the diagnostic phase, and
the follow-up monitoring of BC patients to reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries caused by false positives.
We are currently collecting the evidence to show that our OCT-catheter can solve these umnet needs, and is a gamechanger for bladder cancer diagnostics and treatment.
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