CHARACTERIZACION OF SKIN CANCER WITH OPTO-MAGNETIC IMAGING SPECTROSCOPY

Abstract

Melanoma is the most malignant skin cancer in human population due to late detection, high invasiveness and rapid infiltration. Besides melanoma, skin cancer includes Basal cell cancer (BCC), Squamous cell cancer (SCC), and other rare cancers like Mercel cell carcinoma and Langerhans cell carcinoma. The annual increase of melanoma patients in Serbia is 6%, while this number in the rest of the world varies between 5% and 7%. Various techniques are used to detect and differentiate skin cancers; these techniques differ in the principle of operation and detection efficiency. A novel method is an opto-magnetic imaging spectroscopy (OMIS) based on light-tissue interaction. In more details, this technique measures the difference between responses of the skin when it is illuminated with white or polarized light under normal incidence or under Brewster angle. Different skin responses can also be measured under a fixed incident angle of the blue and the violet light. In this study, OMIS is used for detection and differentiation between simple mole (naevus) and melanoma, and for differentiation between non-melanoma cancer and melanoma. Investigations have included 65 patients with whom different lesions were confirmed by dermoscopy and histopathology. It is shown that good agreement between the results of the OMIS method and histopathological diagnosis were obtained in the sample covering 97% of the patients. This demonstrates that OMIS method can be one of the diagnostic methods for detection and differentiation of skin lesions.