Currently the only way to identify whether a suspicious lump is something to be concerned about is to have it removed surgically and then examined by histological review. But a new diagnostic technique based around Raman spectroscopy could provide a faster diagnosis without the need for such invasive procedures.
Raman Spectroscopy has been used previously to distinguish benign and metastatic axillary lymph nodes (in the breast) and mediastinal nodes (in the oesophagus). Now Nicholas Stone and co-workers at the University of Exeter, UK have now applied the technique to distinguish between different cancerous conditions of lymph nodes in the head and neck.
Doctors coudl soon be using Raman spectroscopy to peform 'optical biopsies' of tumours © Shutterstock
To read the full article please visit Chemistry World.
Discrimination between benign, primary and secondary malignancies in lymph nodes from the head and neck utilising Raman spectroscopy and multivariate analysis
Gavin Rhys Lloyd, Linda E. Orr, Jonathan Christie-Brown, Keith McCarthy, Simon Rose, Michael Thomas and Nicholas Stone
Analyst, 2013, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C2AN36579K
