Manu Jain
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Surgery Curr Res
The diagnosis of skin cancer relies on visual inspection and dermoscopy, often followed by biopsy of the suspicious lesion for histopathological confirmation. Although biopsy and histopathological examination is the gold standard for a definitive diagnosis, a biopsy is an invasive procedure associated with complications such as bleeding, pain, infection, and scarring. A biopsy is especially undesirable for patients with multiple skin cancers, and for lesions located in cosmetically sensitive regions of the face. Histopathology, on the other hand, cannot render an immediate bedside diagnosis as it requires time-consuming tissue processing, often delaying diagnosis and management of the skin lesions. To overcome the existing diagnostic challenges, several non-invasive imaging technologies have emerged in recent years that can image skin at ???near-histological??? resolution without performing a biopsy called ???optical imaging techniques???, including techniques such as reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM), optical coherence tomography (OCT), multi/hyperspectral imaging, Raman microscopy/spectroscopy, photoacoustic tomography, and multiphoton microscopy (MPM). These techniques are primarily used for non-invasive diagnosis of skin lesions in-vivo in real-time to reduce unnecessary biopsies and associated complications. They are also being used to non-invasively monitor skin lesions and post-treatment clearance and/or recurrence of cancer over a period of time. Not only these optical imaging techniques can be used in-vivo but they are also being used for rapidly evaluating ex-vivo tissue for intra-operative margin assessment of tumors during Mohs surgery.
E-mail: jainm@mskcc.org
