Polarization speckle imaging as a potential technique forin vivoskin cancer detection

Abstract

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the Western world. In order to accurately detect the disease, especially malignant melanoma-the most fatal form of skin cancer-at an early stage when the prognosis is excellent, there is an urgent need to develop noninvasive early detection methods. We believe that polarization speckle patterns, defined as a spatial distribution of depolarization ratio of traditional speckle patterns, can be an important tool for skin cancer detection. To demonstrate our technique, we conduct a large in vivo clinical study of 214 skin lesions, and show that statistical moments of the polarization speckle pattern could differentiate different types of skin lesions, including three common types of skin cancers, malignant melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, and two benign lesions, melanocytic nevus and seborrheic keratoses. In particular, the fourth order moment achieves better or similar sensitivity and specificity than many well-known and accepted optical techniques used to differentiate melanoma and seborrheic keratosis.

In vivo laser speckle measurements of skin roughness: clinical study

“…The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is a measure of how well lesion roughness can distinguish between MM vs. SK lesions. The diagnostic accuracy by roughness is close to those demonstrated by the GPs, multispectral method and dermatologists [6] with an area under the ROC curve of 0.731. . …”

Enhanced diagnostic of skin conditions by polarized laser speckles: phantom studies and computer modeling

“…This spatial random distribution of polarization is called polarization speckle and is a subject of statistical optics 6,7 . The results of our recent study 8 demonstrate that polarization speckle has a great potential for skin cancer detection.…”

“…As shown earlier this two-dimensional random field D(x,y) is spatially stationary and therefore can be characterized by the probability density function (pdf) 8 . For routine experimental purpose the pdf is not practical to be used, and that is why we represent polarization speckle field by its' statistical metrics -moments.…”

“…The experimental geometry of free-space speckle device was described in Ref. 8. The new image speckle set up is shown in Figure 1.…”

Monitoring of the action of drugs in melanoma cells by dynamic laser speckle

“…11 In addition, dynamic laser speckle presents itself as a reliable tool to monitor nonbiological samples, such as in paint drying 12 and in zeta potential in colloids. 13 Particularly related to the analysis of cancer tissues, one can see some reports of the adoption of dynamic laser speckle in the identification of melanoma in live human beings, 14 or even the signature in frequency of different types of cancer in animal tissues. 15 Despite the great application of dynamic laser speckle, and despite the reports of many methods to monitor the response of cancer cells, 16 there is no account in the literature about the adoption of dynamic laser speckle associated with preclinical models to monitor the action of drugs in cancer cells.…”