RCT: WLE vs. NBI in Upper Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

It is recognized that gastroscopy can miss intestinal metaplasia, dysplasia and early gastric cancer. This could conceivably be due to the fact that these lesions may only present as subtle mucosal changes on conventional white light endoscopy (WLE) and thus be easily missed. In narrow band imaging (NBI) a rotating interference narrow band filter is interposed after the xenon light source such that when the NBI mode is switched on, discrete blue and green wavelengths are used and this improves mucosal surface contrast and facilitates visualization of mucosal details. A new NBI system is available that allows brighter illumination. We hypothesize that bright -NBI is superior to WLE in detecting focal gastric lesions such as gastric intestinal metaplasia, dysplasia and early gastric cancer in subjects undergoing gastroscopy.