Abstract

Skin cancers can be classified in three major classes: squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), basal cell carcinoma and melanoma. While the first two are effectively treatable even when discovered in more advanced stages, the 5-year survival rate drops dramatically with melanoma progression as this variant can rapidly spread to other sites of the body (the lungs or the brain via the circulatory system). Regardless of their type, the early detection and accurate analysis of skin cancers is of utmost importance in clinical practice, having deep implications over the efficiency of administered therapies, survival probability, sustainability of healthcare systems and emotional comfort of the patients and their relatives. Since skin cancer development modifies tissue morphology and alters its biochemical characteristics, a variety of optical and chemical imaging techniques have been proposed so far as suitable tools to investigate genesis and progression aspects. Among these, multiphoton microscopy (MPM) has emerged as a powerful clinical tool which can non-invasively image and obtain complementary information from human skin [1]. In this work we propose to extend a previously reported polarimetric method [2] to MPM imaging, in order to improve the quality of images collected on human epithelial tissues.

© 2017 IEEE