"Moving Photonics Clinical "
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Abstract: Light interacts with tissue in a variety of different ways some of which can yield clinically diagnostic information.  While determining which technique or combination of techniques (autofluorescence, reflectance spectroscopy or imaging) yields the most relevant information about the tissue of interest can be extremely challenging technically, demonstrating their clinical utility and gaining clinical acceptance can be even more so. Over the last two decades our group and others have focused on the detection and delineation of pre-invasive neoplasia and the introduction of photonic tools to enhance the clinician’s ability to detect and delineate these lesions in the lung, cervix and oral cavities.  As the understanding of the mechanisms and ways in which light interacts with the structure and molecular properties of the interrogated tissue has improved, the pace of clinical development and adoption has increased remarkably. The inclusion of the correlation of the measured optical properties with not only tissue histopathological interpretation but with molecular changes and genetic damage has increased the acceptance of these photonic tools. Examples from the lung, cervix and oral cavity for both the above macroscopic techniques and for quantitative microscopy based phenotyping will be presented.