Raman Spectroscopy for Early Cancer Detection, Diagnosis and Elucidation of Disease-Specific Biochemical Changes - Emerging Raman Applications and Techniques in Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Fields - page 310

Fig. 13.1. Raman spectroscopy for cancer diagnosis - a multipronged approach:
( a ) in vivo endoscopy, ( b) advanced pathology (unstained molecular imaging) and
( c) deep probing
gynaecological cancers [3, 4]. Studies have been performed to differentiate
between different pathologies in a number of tissues including colon [5], oe-
sophagus [6-8], skin [9-11], larynx [12], breast [13, 14], cervix [15-17], bladder
[18, 19], prostate gland [20, 21] and lymph nodes [22-24].
13.1.1 Competing Technologies
Several other optical techniques that rely on various mechanisms by which
light interacts with matter, including absorption, reflection, elastic scattering
and autofluorescence, are also being developed for cancer diagnostics. This
section will discuss these optical biopsy techniques.
Infrared Spectroscopy
Extensive research has been undertaken using infrared (IR) spectroscopy and
imaging to provide rapid mapping of unstained thin tissue biochemistry giving
information on disease state with potential for automated differentiation of
tissues for cancer and non-cancer diagnostics. The diagnosis of many cancers
has been investigated with IR spectroscopy including breast [25, 26], cervix
[27], prostate [28-30], colon [31, 32] and lymph nodes [22, 23, 33]. Interrogation
of biological tissues in real time using infrared spectroscopy has largely been a
challenging proposition because of the strong absorption of mid-infrared light