Eric - pretty good answer, but a couple of errors. So they don't live on the board forever as gospel, here's the correction.

The VELscope is not a ultra violet light. It has a very specific wavelength of blue light (430 nm) produced by a group of specially calibrated LED's. Most people call it a fluorescent light which is way wrong. The reason that they go there, is that it excites some small parts of the cell called flourophores. When those start to vibrate inside the cell, tissue fluoresce takes place, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, but can when viewed through a yellow filter. Cells that do not fluoresce have SOMETHING wrong with them. Something is the operative word here.

The VELscope IS NOT a diagnostic device, and is not approved as one by the FDA. This is because it knows something is broken in the cell, but it does not know what. Hence it is not diagnostic. It finds dysplasia for sure, but it also finds viral, fungal, and bacterial infections, it finds hyperkeritosis, which is just a callous like hardening of the tissue. It also finds some other heathy things which you have to learn to recognize, like heavily vascularized areas. So it is referred to as a discovery device not a diagnostic device. The examiner still has to determine what something is that the VELscope finds. So the device is highly useful, but a long way from the second coming. The big shortcoming in my mind is that it is not helpful in finding early HPV oral cancers.

I'm not so smart, but OCF funded early research at MDACC on tissue fluorescence long before there every was a VELscope, and I have been an advisor to the company for over a decade. So I've been around this technology for a little bit.