Recent technological advances in fiber optics, light sources, detectors, and molecular biology have stimulated unprecedented development of optical methods to detect pathological changes in tissues. These methods, collectively termed "optical biopsy," are nondestructive in situ and real-time assays. Optical biopsy techniques as fluorescence spectroscopy, polarized light scattering spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography, confocal reflectance microscopy, and Raman spectroscopy had been extensively used to characterize several pathological tissues. In special, Raman spectroscopy technique had been able to probe several biochemical alterations due to pathology development as change in the DNA, glycogen, phospholipid, non-collagenous proteins. All studies claimed that the optical biopsy methods were able to discriminate normal and malignant tissues. However, few studies had been devoted to the discrimination of very common subtle or early pathological states as inflammatory process, which are always present on, e.g., cancer lesion border. In this work we present a systematic comparison of optical biopsy data on several kinds of lesions were inflammatory infiltrates play the role (breast, cervical, and oral lesion). It will be discussed the essential conditions for the optimization of discrimination among normal and alterated states based on statistical analysis.

Date Published: 21 February 2011
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 7890, Advanced Biomedical and Clinical Diagnostic Systems IX, 789018 (21 February 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.875407

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7890:
Advanced Biomedical and Clinical Diagnostic Systems IX
Anita Mahadevan-Jansen; Tuan Vo-Dinh; Warren S. Grundfest M.D., Editor(s)