Introduction
Optical biopsies have been shown to be very effective in providing real time, in situ and non-invasive diagnosis of various tissue pathologies. In the head and neck various tissues have been interrogated using this modality including suspicious oral lesions, tumour resection margins and metastatic lymph nodes.
Elastic scattering spectroscopy (ESS) is one of the optical modalities used to identify inflammatory, ischaemic, premalignant and malignant malformation through changes on the cellular and subcellular level.
The aim of this study was to see if ESS could be used to identify benign and malignant skin lesions.