Multi-modal spectroscopy of breast tissue

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer afflicting women in the United States; one out of eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during her lifetime. Currently, screening is performed by a combination of annual clinical breast examinations and x-ray mammography. However, only 10 to 25 percent of suspicious lesions detected during mammography are diagnosed as malignant upon biopsy, which implies that a large number of biopsies can be avoided. Although mammography images anatomic changes, it is not sensitive to the underlying morphological and biochemical changes that distinguish benign and malignant breast lesions. Presently employed diagnostic procedures are invasive, time consuming, and expensive. Thus, there is a clinical need to develop new tools for the early diagnosis of malignancy in the breast. In recent years our laboratory has explored the use of Raman spectroscopy for diagnosing disease; one important area is the detection of breast cancer. Raman spectroscopy provides information about the morphological and biochemical make up of tissue and, with the aid of our diagnostic algorithm, has provided good results in distinguishing between malignant and benign breast lesions, with a sensitivity, specificity, and an overall accuracy of 90, 96, and 86 percent, respectively [Haka,2004].

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Volynskaya, Zoya I

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael S. Feld.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34121