A new population-based study published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology evaluated the real-world performance of a smartphone-based fecal immunochemical test (FIT) designed for at-home colorectal cancer (CRC) screening—no lab visit required.
Conducted within Germany’s BLITZ screening cohort (2021–2023), the study compared a rapid stool test interpreted via smartphone camera with a conventional laboratory FIT among individuals scheduled for screening colonoscopy.
More than half of participants (55%) opted to use the smartphone-based FIT, and 89% viewed it as a useful alternative to traditional lab-based testing. Among users, the digital FIT demonstrated comparable specificity (92%) and similar sensitivity for detecting advanced neoplasms (28% vs. 34%) relative to laboratory FITs—meeting national diagnostic thresholds for CRC screening tools.