Medical device

Abstract

A medical instrument is provided with: an illumination section radiating excitation light for exciting a fluorescent substance given to a subject, to the subject; an image pickup section photoelectrically converting reflected light from the subject to which the excitation light is radiated, to pick up an image of the subject; a reading section holding pixel signals obtained by the photoelectrical conversion and capable of reading the pixel signals non-destructively while changing amplification factors of the held pixel signals by a predetermined unit of pixels; and an image processing section determining an arithmetic mean of the pixel signals read with different amplification factors by the reading section to generate an image. The medical instrument improves visibility of each fluorescent area without occurrence of position displacement even in the case where multiple fluorescent areas with a relatively large brightness / darkness difference exist within one screen.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to medical equipment suitable for fluorescence observation. Background technique [0002] In recent years, cancer diagnosis techniques using molecular target agents have attracted attention. There has been proposed a method of discriminating the presence or absence of cancer based on the fluorescence emitted from the target site after spraying or injecting a fluorescent probe (fluorescence agent) targeting a living protein specifically found in cancer cells to the target site in the living body. This method is useful for early detection of cancer in the digestive tract region. [0003] In an endoscopic device, diagnosis can be performed using this technique. That is, the excitation light from the light source device is irradiated to the subject, and the fluorescence from the fluorescent agent accumulated at the cancer is captured, thereby performing diagnosis of the presence of the cancer and diagnosis of the degree of m...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, when the brightness difference between fluorescent regions is extremely large, it is necessary to apply a large enlargement to the darker region, and there may be whitening of parts other than the fluorescent region, and the image that originally gradually changes gradually becomes less bright due to the decrease in gray scale. Problems with images that change in steps

Images