Carcinogenesis involves the chemical and structural alteration of biomolecules in cells. Aberrant methylation of DNA is a well-known carcinogenic mechanism and a common chemical modification of DNA. Terahertz waves can directly observe changes in DNA because the characteristic energies lie in the same frequency region. In addition, terahertz energy levels are not high enough to damage DNA by ionization. Here, we present terahertz molecular resonance fingerprints of DNA methylation in cancer DNA. Methylated cytidine, a nucleoside, has terahertz characteristic energies that give rise to the molecular resonance of methylation in DNA. Molecular resonance is monitored in aqueous solutions of genomic DNA from cancer cell lines using a terahertz time-domain spectroscopic technique. Resonance signals can be quantified to identify the types of cancer cells with a certain degree of DNA methylation. These measurements reveal the existence of molecular resonance fingerprints of cancer DNAs in the terahertz region, which can be utilized for the early diagnosis of cancer cells at the molecular level.

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Terahertz (THz) imaging is a nondestructive, label-free, rapid imaging technique which gives the possibility of a real-time tracing of drugs within the skin. We evaluated the feasibility of THz dynamic imaging for visualizing serial changes in the distribution and penetration of a topical agent, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) containing ketoprofen, using excised mouse skins. THz imaging was performed for 6 h after drug application to the skin and was compared with the results obtained using the Franz cell diffusion test, a standard in vitro skin absorption test. THz dynamic reflection imaging showed that the reflection signals decreased rapidly during the early time period, and remained constant through the late time period. The area of drug permeation within the skin layer on THz imaging increased with time. The dynamic pattern of THz reflection signal decrease was similar to that of DMSO absorption analyzed by the Franz cell diffusion test, which indicates that THz imaging mainly reflects the DMSO component. This study demonstrates that THz imaging technique can be used for imaging the spatial distribution and penetration of drug-applied sites.

A fast imaging method for a spatial-domain terahertz imaging system based on compressed sensing is proposed. Observing that the correlation between image pixels is localized, the image reconstruction in compressed sensing is performed on a block basis, resulting in a reduced computational load with no degradation in image quality. By applying the proposed method to a conventional spatial-domain terahertz imaging system, it was verified that a 128×128 image reconstructed using 30% measurements has the equivalent quality to that done using full measurements. The proposed method requires no additional hardware, and provides a general solution to fast spatial-domain terahertz imaging.

In this paper, a new fast terahertz reflection tomography is proposed using block-based compressed sensing. Since measuring the time-domain signal on two-dimensional grid requires excessive time, reducing measurement time is highly demanding in terahertz tomography. The proposed technique directly reduces the number of sampling points in the spatial domain without modulation or transformation of the signal. Compressed sensing in spatial domain suggests a block-based reconstruction, which substantially reduces computational time without degrading the image quality. An overlap-average method is proposed to remove the block artifact in the block-based compressed sensing. Fast terahertz reflection tomography using the block-based compressed sensing is demonstrated with an integrated circuit and parched anchovy as examples.