Autofluorescence and diagnostic accuracy of lesions of oral mucosa: a pilot study

The purpose of this study was to determine the accuracy of autofluorescence techniques for diagnosing oral mucosa lesions, using as reference pattern for comparison the visual diagnosis made by a clinical specialist. A pilot study was conducted with 60 patients divided in a control group without mucosal pathology and a study group with known clinical history for mucosal pathology. Both groups were examined by an oral medicine specialist and by a general dentist who used VELscope(r) system, which applies tissue fluorescence visualization to identify oral mucosal abnormalities. Using the VELscope(r) system, the general dentist made overdiagnosis in two cases and underdiagnosis in one case. The sensitivity and specificity for the oral medicine specialist were 1 (95% CI: 0.884 to 1). For the general dentist, the sensitivity did not improve significantly with the use of VELscope(r) system [0.53 (95% CI: 0.343 to 0.717) versus 0.49 (95% CI: 0.406 to 0.773)] and the specificity was 0.80 (95% CI: 0.614 to 0.923). A limitation of the study is the small sample size, which does not fully represent a population and extrapolation of the data should be done carefully. Based on the obtained results, no clinical benefits were obtained using this VELscope(r) system.