Assessment of Skin Deep Layer Biochemical Profile Using Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy

Skin cancer is currently the most common type of cancer with millions of cases diagnosed worldwide yearly. The current gold standard for clinical diagnosis of skin cancer is an invasive and relatively time-consuming procedure, consisting of visual examination followed by biopsy collection and histopathological analysis. Raman spectroscopy has been shown to efficiently aid the non-invasive diagnosis of skin cancer when probing the surface of the skin. In this study, we employ a recent development of Raman spectroscopy (Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy, SORS) which is able to look deeper in tissue and create a deep layer biochemical profile of the skin in areas where cancer lesions subtly evolve. After optimizing the measurement parameters on skin tissue phantoms, we then adopted SORS on human skin tissue from different anatomical areas to investigate the contribution of the different skin layers to the recorded Raman signal. Our results show that using a diffuse beam with zero offset to probe a sampling volume where the lesion is typically included (surface to epidermis-dermis junction), provides the optimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and may be employed in future skin cancer screening applications