Skin Cancer Detection Using Polarized Opticalspectroscopy: in Vitro Studies into the Endogenous Opticalsignatures of Different Cell and Tissue Types

Fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging, which exploitnative tissue fluorescence (autofluorescence), haveemerged as non-invasive real-time tissue diagnostictools and have been under intensive studies in thepast years. However, traditional autofluorescencetechniques have suffered from tissue scattering andabsorption, and thus are generally not efficient fortissue diagnostics. This book introduces a studyusing polarized autofluorescence and polarizedreflectance techniques to reduce tissue scatteringand absorption effects and to reveal endogenousoptical signatures of skin cancer. Normal andmalignant melanocytic cells can be efficientlydiscriminated using fluorescence anisotropy ofcellular NADH. Enzymatic dermis degradation mimickingtumor invasion can be successfully followed by thefluorescence emission and polarized reflectance ofthe dermis. These results should thus shed lights onthe understanding of the endogenous opticalsignatures associated with cancer development, andshould be a valuable reference for researchersworking in the fields of biomedical optics andbiophotonics.