Richards-Kortum, Rebecca2020-07-242021-05-012020-052020-06-22May 2020Hunt, Brady. "Diagnosing Cervical Neoplasia in Rural Brazil: Clinical Trial Outcomes and a Next-generation Point-of-care Imaging System." (2020) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/109104">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/109104</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/109104This work contains a series of clinical studies conducted at a Brazilian cancer hospital to validate a low-cost, portable, high-resolution microendoscope (HRME) for real-time diagnostic evaluation of cervical lesions. Findings from these clinical studies led me to explore two approaches to further improve HRME: 1) improved image analysis algorithms and 2) improved optical instrumentation. In total, five studies are presented: three clinical studies and two technical studies. Taken altogether, these studies provide strong evidence for the potential of HRME to improve cervical cancer prevention in low-resource healthcare settings.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.cervical canceroptical diagnosisin vivo microscopypoint-of-care imagingmachine learningThesis2020-07-24