Clinical biomarkers for cancer recognition and prevention: A novel approach with optical measurements

Abstract

Cancer is the most important cause of death worldwide, and early cancer detection is the most fundamental factor for efficacy of treatment, prognosis, and increasing survival rate. Over the years great effort has been devoted to discovering and testing new biomarkers that can improve its diagnosis, especially at an early stage. Here we report the potential usefulness of new, easily applicable, non-invasive and relatively low-cost clinical biomarkers, based on abnormalities of oral mucosa spectral reflectance and fractal geometry of the vascular networks in several different tissues, for identification of hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer carriers as well for detection of other tumors, even at an early stage. In the near future the methodology/technology of these procedures should be improved, thus making possible their applicability worldwide as screening tools for early recognition and prevention of cancer.

Fractal dimension analysis: A link between porous polystyrene films patterns and cancer cell patterns

“…Thereby, fractals started to have their first applications in biology and medicine. [ 11 ] Recently, with this approach it has been studied the shape of central nervous system neurons in vertebrates, [ 12 ] the frequency spectrum in the human heart beats, [ 13 ] vascular and respiratory tract, [ 14 ] brain surface, [ 15 ] tumor growth, [ 16 ] trabecular bone, [ 17 ] pathological entities such as rectal color polyps [ 18 ] and epithelial tissues in the oral cavity. [ 19 ] Research such as the previous ones, based on fractal analysis with applications in biology/medicine, has allowed the development, verification, and validation of a predictive and quantitative interpretation of biological systems from different approaches at a certain level of detail.…”