Finding skin cancer that escapes the naked eye
Posted Monday, November 30, 2009
You've long been told to look at your moles for any potentially dangerous changes, and during an exam, your dermatologist also relies primarily on sight in order to find signs of skin cancer. But unfortunately, their are lesions that can escape the naked eye.
Enter OSPI or Optical Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging. This technology is employed in a new instrument being developed by Israeli researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which so far, has been able to identify 73 types of legions in volunteers, some of which were melanoma and previously undetected by visual examinations.
"This is an exciting preliminary development since the initial testing shows that we can now identify microscopic tumors in the biological layers of the skin," the lead researcher said of OSPI, which uses infrared wavelengths to safely sense tumors.
"As we continue to develop the OSPI, we also see an opportunity to use this technology for detecting other types of cancerous growths."
Tags: cancer, infrared, melanoma, Optical Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging, OSPI, skin cancer