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


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