Optical properties of normal and cancerous human skin in the visible and near-infrared spectral range
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- 1 January 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SPIE-Intl Soc Optical Eng in Journal of Biomedical Optics
- Vol. 11 (6), 064026-064026-9
- https://doi.org/10.1117/1.2398928
Abstract
Differences in absorption and/or scattering of cancerous and normal skin have the potential to provide a basis for noninvasive cancer detection. In this study, we have determined and compared the in vitro optical properties of human epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous fat with those of nonmelanoma skin cancers in the spectral range from . Fresh specimens of normal and cancerous human skin were obtained from surgeries. The samples were rinsed in saline solution and sectioned. Diffuse reflectance and total transmittance were measured using an integrating sphere spectrophotometer. Absorption and reduced scattering coefficients were calculated from the measured quantities using an inverse Monte Carlo technique. The differences between optical properties of each normal tissue-cancer pair were statistically analyzed. The results indicate that there are significant differences in the scattering of cancerous and healthy tissues in the spectral range from . In this spectral region, the scattering of cancerous lesions is consistently lower than that of normal tissues, whereas absorption does not differ significantly, with the exception of nodular basal cell carcinomas (BCC). Nodular BCCs exhibit significantly lower absorption as compared to normal skin. Therefore, the spectral range between 1050 and appears to be optimal for nonmelanoma skin cancer detection.
Keywords
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