IIT Kanpur transfers oral cancer detection device to Scangenie Scientific 

The device offers quick and painless screening with 90 percent accuracy in clinical settings.

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) has transferred its technology, Munh Parikshak, a portable device for detecting oral cancer, invented by Professor Jayant Kumar Singh and his team from the Department of Chemical Engineering, to Scangenie Scientific.

The device uses special lights and a camera to examine the mouth, providing instant results by analysing mouth images and categorising them as normal, pre-cancerous, or cancerous. The results are displayed on a smartphone app and stored on cloud servers for continuous updates, making it ideal for self-testing, the institute said in a statement.

‘Munh-Parikshak’ is a user-friendly device having white and fluorescence light source that connects wirelessly to smartphones, tablets, iPads, etc. With a built-in power backup, it stores health history for tracking and provides instant oral health reports. The device offers quick and painless screening with 90 percent accuracy in clinical settings. It is safe, radiation-free, and does not require any additional chemicals or processes, the statement added.

According to a 2020 paper published in the National Library of Medicine, oral cancer is the sixth most common type of cancer with India contributing to almost one-third of the total burden and the second country having the highest number of oral cancer cases.

Tobacco consumption, including smokeless tobacco, betel-quid chewing, excessive alcohol consumption, unhygienic oral condition, and sustained viral infections that include the human papillomavirus are some of the risk aspects for the incidence of oral cancer, the paper said.

Lack of knowledge, variations in exposure to the environment, and behavioral risk factors indicate a wide variation in the global incidence and increases the mortality rate, it added.