Optical spectroscopy: current advances and future applications in cancer diagnostics and therapy

Optical spectroscopy (OS) is a tissue-sensing technique that could enhance cancer diagnosis and treatment in the near future. With OS, tissue is illuminated with a selected light spectrum. Different tissue types can be distinguished from each other based on specific changes in the reflected light spectrum that are a result of differences on a molecular level between compared tissues. Therefore, OS has the potential to become an important optical tool for cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the discriminating abilities of OS techniques between normal and cancer tissues of multiple human tissue types. This article provides an overview of the advances made with diffuse reflectance, fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy techniques in the field of clinical oncology, and focuses on the different clinical applications that OS could enhance

Writing Chinese Characters: Right or Left? : The Chinese Discriminatory Policy of Left-Handedness Correction in Terms of Handwriting

Chinese left-handed are found to be very few, especially in terms of handwriting. The Chinese educational policy that fully entitles teachers in primary school to change the left-handed students to write with their right-hand, by nudging and even force, is found to be mainly blamed as the main cause. The thesis is to raise the ethical discussion and define this policy as being discriminatory against the left-handed by checking the features, definition and identification of discrimination, and reasons forming and supporting such a discriminatory policy will be taken into the major consideration as the source of discrimination. Therefore, the thesis is to propose solutions to help with the abolishment of the policy and the elimination of the prejudicial attitudes toward the left-handed, especially in terms of writing. The thesis itself, due to the limit of previous research and scientific support, has its own blindness or disadvantage, however, such a work could be helpful with the later discussion

Acute tryptophan depletion in healthy males attenuates phasic cardiac slowing but does not affect electro-cortical response to negative feedback

Item does not contain fulltextRationale: Recent studies have shown that serotonin might be involved in performance monitoring, although the results have been inconclusive. Inconsistent results might be related to the type of pharmacological manipulation and the used behavioral and physiological measures. Objectives: The present study aimed at further specifying the role of serotonin in performance monitoring. Materials and methods: The effect of serotonin on performance monitoring was studied by using acute tryptophan depletion (ATD), a well-known method to transiently lower central serotonin levels. Twenty healthy male volunteers performed a time-estimation task and their event-related brain potential (ERP), behavioral, and cardiac responses to feedback stimuli were measured. Furthermore, subjective mood and amino-acid levels were determined. Results: As expected, ATD did not affect mood and lowered tryptophan levels. ATD attenuated cardiac slowing to negative feedback but did not affect responses to positive feedback, ERPs, and performance measures. Conclusions: The data point in the direction of a dissociation between cardiac and electro-cortical responses. Cardiac responses appear to be more sensitive to changes in serotonin metabolism and appear to reflect different aspects of the feedback stimulus. The phasic cardiac response appears to be an important measure that provides additional information about the impact of feedback stimuli and serotonergic functioning.9 p

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy: a new guidance tool for improvement of biopsy procedures in lung malignancies

Background:\ud A significant number of percutaneous intrathoracic biopsy procedures result in indeterminate cytologic or histologic diagnosis in clinical practice. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) is an optical technique that can distinguish different tissue types on a microscopic level. DRS may improve needle localization accuracy during biopsy procedures. The objective of this study was to assess the ability of DRS to enhance diagnosis of malignant disease in human lung tissue.\ud \ud Methods:\ud Ex vivo analysis with a DRS system was performed on lung tissue from 10 patients after pulmonary resection for malignant disease. Tissue spectra measured from 500 to 1600 nm were analyzed using 2 analysis methods; a model-based analysis that derives clinical and optical properties from the measurements and a partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) that classifies measured spectra with respect to the histologic nature of the measured tissue.\ud \ud Results:\ud Sensitivity and specificity for discrimination of tumor from normal lung tissue were 89% and 79%, respectively, based on the model-based analysis. Overall accuracy was 84%. The PLS-DA analysis yielded a sensitivity of 78%, a specificity of 86%, and an overall accuracy of 81%.\ud \ud Conclusions:\ud The presented results demonstrate that DRS has the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy in minimally invasive biopsy procedures in the lungs in combination with conventional imaging techniques