We have investigated the potential application of elastic light single-scattering spectroscopy (ELSSS) as an adjunctive tool for screening of cervical precancerous lesions non-invasively and in real time. Ex-vivo measurements were performed on 95 cervix biopsy tissue of 60 patients. Normal cervix tissue from 10 patients after hysterectomy was used as a control group. Correlation between ELSSS spectra and histopathology results were investigated. It was found that the spectral slope was positive for all the spectra taken on normal cervix tissue samples from the control group. We assumed that if there is only one spectrum with a negative spectral slope among the all spectra taken on a biopsy specimen, the biopsy specimen is pathologically abnormal. This shows that pap smear and ELSSS results are in good agreement. Most biopsy tissue samples had both positive and negative spectral slopes. Therefore, we calculated the percentage of negative spectral slopes and hypothesized that this was correlated to dysplastic percentage of the epithelial tissue of the biopsy material. The ROC curve was calculated using the dysplastic percentage and high squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL) and low squamous intraepitherlial lesions (LSIL) biopsy specimens were differentiated from non HSIL and LSIL with a sensitivity and specificity of 70.4% and 66.7% respectively, with p < 0.05.

Date Published: 26 February 2010
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 7573, Biomedical Applications of Light Scattering IV, 75730V (26 February 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.845830

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7573:
Biomedical Applications of Light Scattering IV
Adam P. Wax; Vadim Backman, Editor(s)