Differentiation of skin biopsies by light scattering spectroscopy

Introduction
Spectroscopic systems are medical tools that are used for the detection of cancerous tissues ex vivo and in vivo.

Aim
To differentiate inflammatory and benign skin lesions of excised biopsy samples via a combination of multivariate statistical analysis.

Material and methods
Spectral data were obtained from a total of 22 inflammatory and ten benign skin biopsy samples from 30 patients in the visible wavelength (450–750 nm) regions. Spectral data were compared with the dermatopathology results. Spectral data analyses of biopsy samples were performed via principal component analysis (PCA), followed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The differentiation performance was calculated with the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis.

Results
The classification based on the discriminant function score provided a sensitivity of 90.9% and a specificity of 80% in discriminating benign from inflammatory lesions with an accuracy of 87.5%.

Conclusions
Our study revealed that light scattering spectroscopy could discriminate between inflammatory and benign skin lesions of excised biopsy samples with high sensitivity by using multivariate statistical analysis. It can be concluded that the high diagnostic accuracy of the optical spectroscopy method has the potential to use as a supplementary system to distinguish inflammatory skin lesions from benign during the pathological examination.