A Infrared hyperspectral imaging technique for non-invasive cancer detection

Hyperspectral imaging(HI) is an emerging technology in the field of biomedical engineering which may be used as a non-invasive modality for cancer characterization. In this project, we propose to investigate hyperspectral imaging for the characterization of gastric cancer. The hyperspectral imaging has been used for the detection of various kinds of human cancer; breast, gastric, prostate and tongue. A research group has also investigated the use of reflectance imaging to detect canine cancer using fluorescent dyes. The use of hyperspectral imaging, however, has been limited for the characterization of cancer. In this project, we have already acquired many hyperspectral images of tumors. The malignant tissue has relatively low reflectance intensity compared to the benign tissue. The decreased reflectance intensity observed for malignant tumors is due to the increased microvasculature and therefore higher blood content of cancerous tissue relative to benign tissue. In the future, we will normalize and preprocess the spectral dataset. We propose to apply various algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Principal Component Analysis on the spectral data to discern the malignant and benign tumors. The advantage of cancer detection using hyperspectral imaging is that it is non-invasive, highly efficient and less time consuming than traditional methods like biopsy.