Raman Imaging in Biochemical and Biomedical Applications. Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer

There is strong interest in the development of highly sensitive imaging optical technologies that would shift medical diagnosis to the next level of state-of-the-art in biomedical diagnostics, pathogen detection, gene identification, gene mapping, and DNA sequencing. The optical imaging systems are ideally suited for early detection of intraepithelial diseases, including most cancers, and to assess tumor margins and response to therapy. Optical methods offer several significant advantages. Raman scattering is inelastic scattering, and measuring the difference between the energy of the incident photons and scattered photons, one can obtain information about the vibrational energy and frequencies. The energy of the scattered photon can be shifted to lower frequencies when the incident photon gives part of its energy to the environment bath or to higher frequencies when the incident photon gets the energy from the bath.