Journal of Clinical & Experimental Pathology
Open Access

Abstract

One of the key healthcare delivery problems in developing countries is the non-availability of qualified pathologists in resource poor settings such as rural areas. Patients have to spend significant time, money and effort in traveling to urban areas for accessing medical diagnosis/care. It is highly desirable to have a system that enables local, minimally trained health workers to transmit microscopic images of patient samples such as cytology smears for examination by a remote pathologist. The remote pathologist can access images, analyze them and give their opinion. Based on the opinion, the healthcare worker advises the patient to go to the urban clinic only if is necessary. We have developed a telemicroscopy device for capturing images from a slide into a mobile device. This device was tested in a cohort of patients in and around Bangalore, India for oral cancer detection using brush biopsy. Incision/punch biopsies of the same patients were considered the gold-standard against which results from the telemicroscopy device were tested. The talk will focus on results of the study and potential of the device for oral cancer screening.

Biography

Praveen Gurpur was trained as a medical Doctor in India. He then went on to do his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For his PhD, he worked on a novel integrin based therapy for muscular dystrophy, using small molecules. Following his graduation, he did his post-doctoral training at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where he developed a cell-based screening platform using muscle stem cells to identify small molecules against muscular dystrophy. He then worked in a drug discovery company in India where he managed the in vitro assay development program for pain and inflammation. He then joined Siemens, India, where he is a project manager in Biosciences. He has several publications to his credit. He has also been an acclaimed teacher for an undergraduate course. His expertise spans across Clinical Medicine, Molecular & Cellular Biology, Drug Discovery and Medical Devices, among others.