Vibrational Spectroscopy and Cancer - Vibrational Spectroscopy for Tissue Analysis - page 55

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Vibrational Spectroscopy and Cancer
Introduction
In recent years, applications of IR and Raman spectroscopy have increased a
great deal. It seems that still the majority of studies being carried out using these
methods are concentrated on areas related to chemistry and polymers, such as
different types of coatings on membranes, analysing the process of progress in
chemical reaction, etc. [1-30]. However, some other research groups have con-
centrated on applications of spectroscopy in other fields, such as astronomy [31],
archaeology [32,33] and forensic sciences [34,35]. A newly emerged field, the
application of these spectroscopic methods on biological studies, particularly
on clinical studies related to malignancy and cancer detection, has attracted
different research groups all over the world. These methods have been reported
on a number of biological tissues including, bone, skin, colon, lung, breast,
heart, cornea, liver, prostate, gastric, larynx, oral, cervix, and endometrium.
This chapter reviews the studies that have been reported in the literature.
A few researchers have focused on reviewing the work of others in the
past (Table 4.1). In particular, there are three review articles that deal with
the applications of Raman and vibrational spectroscopy in the detection of
cancer, written by A. M. Jansen and R. R. Kortum [36], Hanlon et al. [37],
and R. K. Dukor [38]. They cover several topics including principles of the
techniques, cancer and cell biology, the technique's sensitivity to structures
of biological molecules such as proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids, IR and
Raman sampling techniques, instrumentation considerations, a summary of
clinical applications of Raman spectroscopy in diagnosis of cancers of differ-
ent organs, and the perspectives of the future.
Skin Cancer
The article by Choo-Smith et al. [39] is on medical applications of Raman
spectroscopy, from proof of principle to clinical implementation. They named
some of the various biomedical issues that are addressed by the technique,
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