Журнал медицинских методов диагностики
Открытый доступ
ISSN: 2168-9784
ISSN: 2168-9784
Sung Hyun Pyun
There have been many attempts to develop and apply in vivo skin cancer diagnostic methods based on different types of technologies, such as multi-spectral imaging, reflectance confocal microscopy, optical coherence tomography, Raman spectroscopy and electrical impedance spectroscopy, etc. However, they have insufficient diagnostic accuracy for clinical use, resulting in none of the aforementioned technologies are widely used as reliable skin cancer diagnostic method in real clinical settings.
Laser Induced Plasma Spectroscopy (LIPS) is a relatively recently developed laser spectroscopic method which utilize an ultrashort pulsed laser to extract chemical information of a target material noninvasively in real time. LIPS is regarded as a rapid and accurate tool for the analysis of molecularly complex clinical samples. LIPS has been used for the analysis of malignant tissues, such as breast cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer and cutaneous melanoma.
It has been revealed that LIPS is effective for discriminating organic compounds with different biochemical compositions. In principle, a few nanosecond-long pulse of light from a pulsed laser is irradiated onto the tissue surface to induce microplasma without any tissue damage or scarring. The emitted light from the microplasma is collected and resolved spectrally to generate emission spectra from the tissue enabling both elemental and molecular analysis.