Multimodal optical spectroscopic approach to design a complete protocol for early diagnosis of oral cancer

Oral cancer is one of the most malignant cancers in the world. Early-stage diagnosis of oral cancer is complex process due to the multifocal unspecific development of non-malignant lesions into cancer and impossibility to take biopsy of every lesion. The aim of this study is to develop a screening method for oral cancer diagnosis at early stages using surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) and validate the performance of a multimodal system including Raman spectroscopic (RS) and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) oral cancer diagnosis and accurate margin detection. The study will involve the identification and integration of spectral biomarkers involved in the carcinogenesis process from different modalities. Each modality SERS, RS and DRS is calibrated and standardized individually. Patients suffering from oral squamous cell carcinoma and other malignant diseases going through biopsy or histopathological examination are enrolled in this study. Ex vivo study involves the SERS analysis of saliva specimen and in vivo analysis will involve measurements on various tissue types, including malignant tissue and healthy contralateral site to evaluate the reproducibility and signal-To-noise ratio using fiber-optic probes for Raman and DRS systems. Feature selection methods and further machine learning tools will be used to discriminate between healthy, benign and cancer lesions based on spectral information and to identify important biomarkers. After data collection, clinician will perform a normal biopsy procedure and histopathological analysis, which will serve as gold standard to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the spectroscopy techniques.