Applicability of Optical Reflectance Spectroscopy for Detection of Pre- cancerous Lesions in Uterine Cervix in Vivo

Background: We assessed the performance of single fiber refectance spectroscopy (SFRS) in discriminating cervical squamous in- traepithelial lesions (SIL) from non-SILs and the probable infuence of environmental factors on its performance. Methods: SFRS was used to measure the refected light from cervical tissue of 157 patients undergoing standard colposcopy. Seven parameters extracted from the spectra in addition to two biographic parameters were used to compare the biopsy-confirmed SILs with non-SILs. The tissue classification capability was reported by receiver operating characteristic (ROG) curves. In addition, the effect of five interfering parameters, including the probe, clinician, hospital, menopausal status and age of the patient on spectroscopic parameters were investigated by the Kruskal-wallis test. Results: The average vessel diameter and beta-carotene concentration were found to be the parameters contributing to tissue discrimi- nation. SFRS could differentiate between SILs and non-SILs with sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROG curve of 63% ± 6%, 68% ± 6% and 0.69 ± 0.04, respectively. None of the five environmental parameters interfered with the discriminator spectroscopic parameters. Conclusions: SFRS was found as a noninvasive, fast, compact, cost-effective, independent, and acceptably accurate system to help the clinician to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies during the colposcopy procedure.