CRAFT: Multimodality confocal skin imaging for early cancer diagnosis

Abstract

Although histological analysis serves as a gold standard to cancer diagnosis, its application on skin cancer detection is largely prohibited due to its invasive nature. To obtain both the structural and pathological information in situ, a Confocal Reflectance/Auto-Fluorescence Tomography (CRAFT) system was established to examine the skin sites in vivo with both reflectance and autofluorescence modes simultaneously. Nude mice skin with cancerous sites and normal skin sites were imaged and compared with the system. The cellular density and reflective intensity in cancerous sites reflects the structural change of the tissue. With the decay coefficient analysis, the corresponding NAD(P)H decay index for cancerous sites is 1.65-fold that of normal sites, leading to a 97.8% of sensitivity and specificity for early cancer diagnosis. The results are verified by the followed histological analysis. Therefore, CRAFT may provide a novel method for the in vivo, non-invasive diagnosis of early cancer.