Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Future Potential Clinical Applications of
Diagnosis
Spectroscopic techniques appear to have immense promising potential in help-
ing with the diagnosis of human diseases including infections, inflammatory
conditions, and various cancers. Currently, although imaging can aid in diagno-
sis of a lot of disease processes, histopathological tissue diagnosis remains the
gold standard for diagnosis of most clinical conditions. In this respect, spectro-
scopic techniques can be of immense value to aid histopathological diagnosis.
Below are a few of the many possible diagnostic applications of spectroscopy.
breast Cancer
Breast cancer commonly presents as a palpable lump. However, screening
mammography is the most common technique for detecting nonpalpable,
highly curable breast cancer, but the technique has its limitations, as not
all of mammographically detected lesions are found to be malignant upon
needle biopsy. As a consequence of the limitations of current techniques,
each year a large number of breast biopsies are performed on benign lesions.
Improvement in this assessment may be possible with the help of vibrational
spectroscopy, improving the accuracy of diagnosis.
The majority of breast cancers are invasive adenocarcinomas, also known
as invasive ductal carcinomas (IDC), which are graded according to the Ellis
and Elston modification of the Bloom and Richardson criteria, as grade I well-
differentiated, grade II moderately differentiated, and grade III poorly differ-
entiated carcinomas [1,2]. The preinvasive stage of the disease is considered to
be ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which is also graded into three different
nuclear grades. The management of IDC and DCIS have some differences.
Rehman et al. reported on the use of both the Fourier transform infrared
(FTIR) and Raman spectroscopic methods for analysis of breast cancer grades,
both DCIS and IDC. This work has shown that not only it is possible to differ-
entiate between normal breast, DCIS, and IDC, but the nuclear grades of breast
cancer tissues can be successfully distinguished [3,4]. The initial results are
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