Optical Observation of Lung Cancer With Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared Microscope (ATR-FTIR) and Confocal Raman Microscope

Optical observation of lung cancer tissues using attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared microscope (ATR-FTIR) and confocal Raman microscope were performed. A total of six malignant tissues, seven tissues adjacent to cancer, and nine normal tissues from nine patients with known lung cancer were studied. High-quality spectra from human tissues were obtained only in a few seconds. The results revealed that some of the spectral characteristics varied significantly between normal and malignant tissues, that is, IR peak positions, Raman shift, and the spectral intensities. Differences in positions of 10 main peaks in IR shifts and 13 main peaks in Raman shifts were listed, and the intensity changes were also studied between the malignant and normal tissues. The ratios of 1453-cm-1/1645-cm-1 intensity in IR spectrum and 1245-cm-1/1571-cm-1 intensity in Raman spectrum were found with the most significant difference (p0.0001 and p0.05 separately) in statistics and may be used in combination to differentiate the normal and malignant tissues. ATR-FTIR spectrum and Raman spectrum were mutually complementary in the observation of many materials and were both found with high sensitivities and spatial resolutions in the observation of human tissues. This study will be helpful to developing rapid and accurate cancer detection techniques in future clinical diagnosis.