the Aberrant Crypt Foci, and Comparative Assessment with

Copyright © 2012 Massimo Mascolo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The colorectal carcinoma represents one of the most common and aggressive malignancies, still characterized by an unacceptable mortality rate, mainly due to the high metastatic potential and to a late diagnosis. In the last years, the research community focused on the chance of improving the endoscopic screening to detect neoplastic lesions in a very early stage. Several studies proposed aberrant colonic crypt foci as the earliest recognizable step of transformation in colonic multiphase carcinogenesis. We previously demonstrated the clinical applicability and predictive power of probe-based confocal laser endoscopy (pCLE) in superficial colorectal neoplastic lesions and also characterized in vivo a case of dysplasia-associated lesional mass (DALM) in ulcerative colitis. Now, we aim to evaluate the accuracy of pCLE in the detection of ACF comparing in double-blind manner th