Clinical Trial: The Efficacy of i-Scan for Detecting Reflux Esophagitis

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Interventional



Official Title: A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial of the Efficacy of i-Scan for Detecting Reflux Esophagitis

Brief Summary:

Endoscopy is a widely used modality for the diagnosis and classification of Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and the extent of esophageal mucosal breaks on endoscopy can be assessed. However, there were some limitation in diagnosis of GERD using endoscopy

  1. More than half of patients with GERD reveal no visible abnormality on conventional endoscopy, it is possible that minute mucosal changes are underestimated by conventional endoscopy due to the limitation of visual ability
  2. In addition of uncertainty in detecting mucosal breaks, uncertainty in describing severity of mucosal injury can lead to inconsistency among interpreters. Interobserver agreement regarding diagnosis and classification of GERD using endoscopy is unsatisfactory to apply daily practice.

Thus, the development of a new method to define the intra-esophageal injury for use in daily practice is a worthwhile endeavor and developed, such as narrow−band imaging (NBI), Fuji Intelligent Chromoen−doscopy (FICE) and i-scan.

Among them, i-scan technology is the most recently developed image enhancing technology, which consists of three modes of image enhancement, i.e. surface enhancement (SE), contrast enhancement (CE), and tone enhancement (TE).

Thus, the investigators examined the hypothesis that i-scan can improve the detection rate of reflux esophagitis and inter-observer agreement between endoscopists compared with conventional white light (WL) endoscopic examination.