====== Optical Biopsy (Tissue level) Theme ======

===== Description of the Technology =====
Optical Biopsy: to provide clinical information equivalent to that available from a physical biopsy. Usually assumed to mean equivalent to information available from stained sections of formalin fixed paraffin embedded biopsy tissue, specifically pathological assessment of same.  

==== Basic modalities ====
  * Point Spectroscopy
      * Reflectance & Fluorescence
      * Raman
      * IR
      * Spatially resolved, Time Domain, Polarized

==== Current research in the group ====
**UBC: Calum MacAulay, Haisha Zheng, Pierre Lane**: \\ 
Raman, Reflectance and Fluorescence Spectroscopy, In vivo confocal microendscopy, multi-photon\\ 
Anatomical Location: Skin, Lung, GI, Cervix\\ 

**McMaster: Qiyin Fang, Joe Hayward, Tom Farrell, Mike Patterson**: \\ 
Time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy & imaging, Diffused Reflectance + TRF; \\ 
Anatomical Location: Brain, GI, Lung\\ 

**UCLA: Warren Grundfest, William H. Yong** \\

**UC Irvine: **


===== Challenges =====
Sensitivity and Specificity

Identifying opportunities/indications needing/requiring immediate clinical action (see and treat methodology) since in the genomic age if a biopsy can be taken it will be for conventional pathology (current practice) and genetic/genomic analysis (future studies)

==== Significant clinical problems ====
Brain, Heart, etc (tissues for which biopsy entails significant clinical risk)

Screening settings in which low specificity of primary test could result in too frequent biopsy which induces costs or morbidity (Oral, Skin, etc)

==== Key technology barriers ====

===== What the group can do =====

===== Commercialization pathways =====

==== potential industrial partners ====

===== References =====