Design and Validation of a Novel Low Cost Point of Care Tampon (POCkeT) Colposcope for Use in Resource Limited Settings

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

12:00pm | 125 Hudson Hall

Presenter

Dr. Jenna Mueller , Chambers Scholar, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Cervical cancer disproportionately burdens women in low-resource settings, with over 85% of cervical cancer deaths occurring in developing countries due to lack of access to effective, high-quality screening programs that facilitate prevention, early detection and successful treatment. We have developed a miniaturized hand-held optical cervical imaging device, the Point of Care Tampon (POCkeT) colposcope. The aim of this work was to evaluate whether the performance of this low cost and easily deployed instrument is equivalent in image quality to a more expensive standard-of-care binocular Leisegang Optik 2 colposcope at identifying potential precancerous lesions of the cervix as evaluated by eight international physicians from high, middle and low income countries.

Dr. Jenna Mueller is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Nimmi Ramanujam's Tissue Optical Spectroscopy Lab at Duke University who is interested in the intersection of biomedical engineering and global health. Specifically, she is interested in developing low cost optical devices to diagnose breast and cervical cancer in resource limited settings. She received her B.S. degree in Bioengineering from Rice University in 2009 with a minor in Global Health Technologies. She completed her M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2013 and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2015.