Endoscopic Ultrasound Fine Needle Aspiration Technique For Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis

The successful diagnosis and treatment of cancerous growths requires as timely and non-invasive a procedure as possible. Epithelial tumors are often more readily accessible as they are on or adjacent to the lumen wall of the GI and vocal tract. The endomicroscopy of these cells' lesions can provide both the localization and the type of cancer, if any. The more conventional technique for this is endoscopic ultrasound fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA). With the ultrasound probe and cytology sampling from this apparatus, this technique can perform relatively non-invasive sampling with fewer sampling passes. With the ancillary additions to the EUS-FNA device, improvements are consistently being done: better needles, more sensitive probes, improved cytology samplers, enhanced endomicroscopy techniques, and introduced accessory microscopic techniques. Despite these current and ongoing improvements EUS-FNA is not a stand-alone "gold standard" cancer diagnosis technique. Such problems as false negative frequencies, difficulty of the technique, and difficulty of lesion identification make EUS-FNA a complementary technique to increase the sensitivity of cancer diagnosis only [10, 15].