The clinical effectiveness of reflectance optical spectroscopy for the in vivo diagnosis of oral lesions

Optical spectroscopy devices are being developed and tested for the screening and diagnosis of oral precancer and cancer lesions. This study reports a device that uses white light for detection of suspicious lesions and green–amber light at 545 nm that detect tissue vascularity on patients with several suspicious oral lesions. The clinical grading of vascularity was compared to the histological grading of the biopsied lesions using specific biomarkers. Such a device, in the hands of dentists and other health professionals, could greatly increase the number of oral cancerous lesions detected in early phase. The purpose of this study is to correlate the clinical grading of tissue vascularity in several oral suspicious lesions using the Identafi® system with the histological grading of the biopsied lesions using specific vascular markers. Twenty-one patients with various oral lesions were enrolled in the study. The lesions were visualized using Identafi® device with white light illumination, followed by visualization of tissue autofluorescence and tissue reflectance. Tissue biopsied was obtained from the all lesions and both histopathological and immunohistochemical studies using a vascular endothelial biomarker (CD34) were performed on these tissue samples. The clinical vascular grading using the green–amber light at 545 nm and the expression pattern and intensity of staining for CD34 in the different biopsies varied depending on lesions, grading ranged from 1 to 3. The increase in vascularity was observed in abnormal tissues when compared to normal mucosa, but this increase was not limited to carcinoma only as hyperkeratosis and other oral diseases, such as lichen planus, also showed increase in vascularity. Optical spectroscopy is a promising technology for the detection of oral mucosal abnormalities; however, further investigations with a larger population group is required to evaluate the usefulness of these devices in differentiating benign lesions from potentially malignant lesions. A screening tool that uses multispectral light can help clinicians and dentists discriminate between oral cancer and other mouth diseases. The Identafi device uses three different types of light to diagnose abnormalities in the oral mucosa. Standard examinations of mouth lesions can be made with white light; violet light reveals tissue fluorescence and amber-green light can then reveal differences in blood supply between healthy and diseased tissues. Diana Messadi and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Dentistry, USA, tested the device in 21 people with various oral lesions. The researchers also took tissue biopsies and measured levels of CD34, a marker for endothelial cells. They showed the reflectance of green-amber light correlated with the degree of cellular abnormality. This pilot study supports the use of Identafi for detecting cancerous and precancerous oral lesions.