Cancer is the worldwide leading cause of death in pets. It is responsible for the death of 47 percent of dogs aged over 10 years, and subcutaneous and dermal masses are detected approximately 10 times a week, at every veterinary clinic.
Early diagnosis is the most important step in cancer treatment and has been shown to improve the pet’s prognosis. However, today’s diagnosis process is extremely frustrating:
- Current procedures are invasive and painful
- Diagnosis involves long lab waiting times – answers are provided days or weeks after detection and only once FNA and a biopsy are performed. Place where digital cytology is available still has to wait one to two hours for results after testing. This leads to pet owner anxiety and can lead to delayed testing and treatment to the point that sometimes it’s already too late
- Low accuracy – FNA and digital cytology have low negative predictive value (NPV), which is essential to ensure a mass is not cancerous and avoid biopsy
- It is expensive
Pet owners would be happy to gain access to a new detection method at their local vet clinic and would benefit from such an option as well.
Therefore a method that is non-invasive, inexpensive, providing highly accurate result and “on-the-spot” results within minutes, instead of days/weeks – during a single visit, would be welcomed.
HT Vista is the first non-invasive medical device that allows veterinarians to rule out cancer of subcutaneous and dermal masses – quickly, affordably, and within the clinical setting.
Any cutaneous or subcutaneous mass that can be easily palpated. Note that some types of masses are not suitable for HT Vista scanning.
HT Vista is based on heat diffusing imaging (HDI). This new medical device sends heat waves to the tissue, which then flow safely inside the body.
HT Vista reads the signal and sends it to a unique cloud database, then, a sophisticated algorithm based on computer vision and artificial intelligence analyzes the results and compares the new case with those stored within an existing database to provide an accurate classification of the lesion as malignant or benign.
The results are immediately delivered back to the console, enabling fast, in-clinic decision-making.
During the scan, the thermal camera continuously measures the tissue’s temperature, as it is heated and then left to cool.
The tissue is heated up 6 to 10 degrees Celsius, using a visible blue light (460 nm), over the course of 10 seconds.
Unlike with X-ray, UV, and additional wavelengths in the spectrum that use radiation, causing damage to living tissue, HT Vista is safe to use in clinics and doesn’t have any special requirements.
Normal and abnormal tissues transfer heat differently due to their differences in metabolism, tissue morphology, heat capacity and more.
HT Vista extracts these differences (decay rate, signal noise, start and end temperature, etc.) with the help of mathematical models.
The algorithm is based on signals produced by the thermal sensor from both suspected and healthy areas, on the same scan. The unique algorithms are trained to extract those differences in properties highlighted above, and therefore generate highly-reliable results.
Results are presented using a numerical 1 to 10 scale: 1 to 4 means that further investigation is recommended (another HDI scan, cytology, biopsy, etc..), while 5 to 10 means that the mass appears to be benign with a 98 percent certainty (NPV).
The differences between the numbers represent the probability of the mass is benign. This is how HT Vista is able to rule out cancer effectively. The more data it collects, the more the algorithm learns, and the more accurate its predictions become.
