Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Friday, November 30, 2007
Optical Imaging for Medicine and Biology: Applications in Cancer Detection
8:00AM-4:00PM, Cocktail Hour 4:00-5:00PM
The Photonics Center
8 Saint Mary's Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02215

Host:
Professor Jerome Mertz, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Boston University
College of Engineering
44 Cummington Street
Boston, MA 02215

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Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Speaker: Irving J. Bigio, Professor, Boston University

Title: Elastic light scattering spectroscopy for the detection of early cancer and pre-cancer

Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Physics

Optical spectroscopy mediated by fiber-optic probes can be used to perform noninvasive, or minimally-invasive, real-time assessment of tissue pathology in-situ.  The most common approaches have been based on UV-induced fluorescence spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, which are assumed to be responsive to biochemical changes in cells.  On the other hand, the method of elastic-scattering spectroscopy (ESS) is sensitive to the sub-cellular architectural changes, such as nuclear grade and nuclear to cytoplasm ratio, mitochondrial size and density, etc., which correlate with features used by pathologists when performing histological assessment.  The ESS method senses those morphology changes in a semi-quantitative manner, without actually imaging the microscopic structure.  Clinical demonstrations of ESS have been conducted in a variety of organ sites, and promising results have been obtained.  Larger-scale clinical studies are now starting.

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