Noninvasive in-vivo optical properties of skin tumors

This paper presents a study for in-vivo estimation of optical properties of pigmented skin tumor by oblique incidence diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The developed system has been tested in clinical conditions to compare the optical properties of melanomas, dysplastic nevi and common nevi. The spatio-spectral data are collected in the wavelength range of 455 to 765 nm from 96 pigmented skin lesions including 10 histopathologically diagnosed as melanoma, 67 as dysplastic nevi and 19 lesions as common nevi. The preliminary results indicate significantly larger average reduced scattering coefficient spectra for malignant and dysplastic lesions than for benign common nevi.