Amelink, A

Sterenborg, HJCM

Visscher, S

Witjes, M

English

PubMed

HJCM Sterenborg

M Witjes

S Visscher

A Amelink

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Head & Neck Oncology

Differential Pathlength Spectroscopy for diagnosis of head and neck cancer

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ORAL PRESENTATION Open Access
Differential Pathlength Spectroscopy for diagnosis
of head and neck cancer
HJCM Sterenborg*, M Witjes, S Visscher, A Amelink
From 2nd Scientific Meeting of the Head and Neck Optical Diagnostics Society
San Francisco, CA, USA. 23-24 January 2010
The development of optical techniques for non-invasive
diagnosis of cancer is an ongoing challenge to biomedical
optics. For oral cancer biopsy has a low specificity
because of a thick keratin layer that often covers poten-
tial malignancies. We investigated the possibility to
distinguishing potentially malignant visible lesions from
benign ones to reduce the number of unnecessary
biopsies.
Major challenge here is to measure through the thick
keratin layer that often covers the biologically active
layers. Differential Pathlength Spectroscopy is a fibre
optic measurement technique that samples tissue in a
predetermined sampling volume. We constructed a
probe for sampling up to 1mm deep into the tissue.
By analysing the white light spectrum with a mathemati-
cal model developed earlier we could determine scatter-
ing parameters, blood volume, micro vascular saturation
and the average blood vessel diameter in the sample
volume just below the probe.
A total of 110 measurements were performed in 21
patients on 75 suspicious lesions that were biopsied
after measurement and 35 clinically normal locations
that were not biopsied. Lesions were classified as nor-
mal, hyperplasia, inflammation, dysplasia or cancer.
With this data we built a logistic regression model that
predicts the need for a biopsy (if classification equals
dysplasia or cancer) on the basis of the spectra. The
model was trained and evaluated using the leave-one-
out-approach. The results showed a very good combina-
tion of relative sensitivity and specificity with an area
under the curve of 0.943. When removing the obvious
lesions from the dataset (i.e. the unbiopsied normals
and half the samples classified as cancer that were clini-
cally unmistakable, the area under the ROC curve even
improved to 0.951. In practice this comes down to
reducing the number of biopsies to 50% without redu-
cing the overall sensitivity of the diagnostic procedure,
or reducing the number of biopsies by 90% at a loss of
5% relative sensitivity.
We believe Differential Pathlength Spectroscopy is a
very promising technique that may help to reduce the
costs of healthcare without compromising the quality.
Published: 29 October 2010
doi:10.1186/1758-3284-2-S1-O3
Cite this article as: Sterenborg et al.: Differential Pathlength
Spectroscopy for diagnosis of head and neck cancer. Head & Neck
Oncology 2010 2(Suppl 1):O3.
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Center for Optical Diagnostics and Therapy, Erasmus Medical Centre,
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Sterenborg et al. Head & Neck Oncology 2010, 2(Suppl 1):O3
http://www.headandneckoncology.org/content/2/S1/O3
© 2010 Sterenborg et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.


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Differential Pathlength Spectroscopy for diagnosis of head and neck cancer

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