A pilot study on the use of autofluorescence spectroscopy for diagnosis of the cancer of human oral cavity

Abstract

The results of a pilot study to evaluate the potential of autofluorescence spectroscopy for the diagnosis of the cancer of oral cavity are presented. The study was carried out using a N₂ laser-based system developed in-house and involved 25 patients with histopathologically confirmed squamous cell carcinoma of oral cavity. A general multivariate statistical algorithm was developed to analyse and extract clinically useful information from the oral tissue spectra acquired in vivo. The algorithm could differentiate, over the sample size investigated, the squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity from normal squamous tissue with a sensitivity and specificity of 86% and 63%, respectively towards cancer. The relatively poor specificity is presumably because most of the patients investigated had advanced cancers, due to which some of the visually uninvolved sites treated as normal may not be truly normal.