Thermo-optic measurements and their inter-dependencies for delineating cancerous breast biopsy tissue from adjacent normal.

The histopathological diagnosis of cancer is the current gold standard to differentiate normal from cancerous tissues. We propose a portable platform prototype to characterize the tissue's thermal and optical properties, and their inter-dependencies to potentially aid the pathologist in making an informed decision. The measurements were performed on 10 samples from five subjects, where the cancerous and adjacent normal were extracted from the same patient.

Towards a Portable Platform Integrated With Multispectral Noncontact Probes for Delineating Normal and Breast Cancer Tissue Based on Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Currently, the confirmation of diagnosis of breast cancer is made by microscopic examination of an ultra-thin slice of a needle biopsy specimen. This slice is conventionally formalin-fixed and stained with hematoxylin-eosin and visually examined under a light microscope. This process is labor-intensive and requires highly skilled doctors (pathologists).

Emerging technologies for antibiotic susceptibility testing.

Superbugs such as infectious bacteria pose a great threat to humanity due to an increase in bacterial mortality leading to clinical treatment failure, lengthy hospital stay, intravenous therapy and accretion of bacteraemia. These disease-causing bacteria gain resistance to drugs over time which further complicates the treatment. Monitoring of antibiotic resistance is therefore necessary so that bacterial infectious diseases can be diagnosed rapidly.

Electronic nose: a non-invasive technology for breath analysis of diabetes and lung cancer patients.

In human exhaled breath, more than 3000 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are found, which are directly or indirectly related to internal biochemical processes in the body. Electronic noses (E-noses) could play a potential role in screening/analyzing various respiratory and systemic diseases by studying breath signatures. An E-nose integrates a sensor array and an artificial neural network that responds to specific patterns of VOCs, and thus can act as a non-invasive technology for disease monitoring.