This article is part of the supplement: 1st Scientific Meeting of the Head and Neck Optical Diagnostics Society .

Oral presentation

Elastic light scattering spectroscopy for the detection of pre-cancer: an overview

Irving J Bigio

Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Physics, Medicine, Boston University, USA

corresponding author email

from 1^st Scientific Meeting of the Head and Neck Optical Diagnostics Society
London, UK. 14 March 2009

Head & Neck Oncology 2009, 1(Suppl 1):O1doi:10.1186/1758-3284-1-S1-O1

Published:	28 July 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Optical spectroscopy mediated by fibre-optic probes can be used to perform non-invasive, or minimally-invasive, real-time assessment of tissue pathology in-situ. 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 without actually imaging the microscopic structure. Clinical demonstrations of ESS have been conducted in a variety of organ sites, with promising results, and larger-scale clinical studies are now ongoing. We have recently developed an analytical model that extracts, from the ESS spectra, the underlying physical correlates of the tissue relating to disease.