Comparison between the normal cervical tissue and tissue lesion for different stages. Credit: J. Xiao/Central South University, China
Researchers from Central South University in China have now shown that cervical cancer may be spotted using a photoacoustic technique that analyzes the screened tissue in-depth and doesn’t involve a nowadays standard biopsy.
Photoacoustics involves beaming light at an object and detecting sound waves that form within the object due to the light’s excitation. The team used samples of healthy and cancerous cervical tissue from real patients and embedded them within phantoms to simulate sampling through real tissue. Special software was used to analyze the data gathered from the photoacoustic transducers. The investigators were able not only to detect the cancerous lesions, but to also identify what stage they were in.
From the study abstract in Biomedical Optics Express:
A total of 30 in-vitro experiments were carried out in this study, and the obtained depth maximum amplitude projection (DMAP) images were analyzed to evaluate the extent of the angiogenesis for different clinical stages of CC. Stronger absorption from the cervical lesions is observed relative to that of normal tissue. Paired t-test indicates that the difference in mean optical absorption (MOA) between normal tissue and cervical lesion has statistical significance with a confidential coefficient of 0.05. Statistical results also show that the MOAs of the cervical lesions are closely related to the severity of CC. These results imply that PAI may have great utility in the clinical diagnosis of CC.
Study in Biomedical Optics Express: Detection of cervical cancer based on photoacoustic imaging—the in-vitro results…
OSA press release: Potential New Tool for Cervical Cancer Detection and Diagnosis…
