Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States, with an incidence rate that continues to rise. Fortunately, it can be highly curable if detected at an early stage. Best clinical practices require physicians to screen large areas of skin, identify suspicious lesions, perform biopsies, and await the results for disease diagnosis. This paradigm is not ideal. Identification of questionable lesions can be subjective, biopsy is invasive and painful, and pathological analysis is time consuming and costly. The potential of a variety of novel optical techniques to perform rapid, non-invasive optical biopsy has been widely touted; however these methods suffer unique limitations. Raman spectroscopy (RS) can classify lesions with high accuracy due to its inherent biochemical sensitivity; however it is unable to relate microstructural features of disease. Conversely, optical coherence tomography (OCT) can image tissue microstructure but lacks molecular specificity. The two methods are ideally complimentary and thus well-suited for combination into a single instrument to meet the challenge optical biopsy presents. The primary objective of this dissertation is to develop the novel technique of combined RS-OCT for characterization skin cancers. A pilot study that identifies the capabilities and limitations of RS for skin cancer diagnosis was performed in the first aim, and motivates the development of combined RS-OCT. The second aim demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of combined RS-OCT in a benchtop instrument with integrated RS and OCT sampling optics. The third aim is the development of a second generation instrument which further integrates the systems at the detector level. The final aim reports the implementation of an instrument and probe capable of combined RS-OCT analysis of skin cancers in a clinical setting. The results of this dissertation represent a significant step towards the ultimate goal of optical biopsy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-12222009-134454 |
| Date | 23 December 2009 |
| Creators | Patil, Chetan Appasaheb |
| Contributors | Ton van Leeuwen, David Dickensheets, Bob Galloway, Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, E. Duco Jansen, Darrel Ellis |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu//available/etd-12222009-134454/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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