Prostate Cancer

Another opportunity for eliminating the need for biopsy surgery is in the area of prostate cancer, where OCT has shown to correlate well with actual tissue samples.

About 1 man in 6 will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime.  Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. The American Cancer Society’s estimates for prostate cancer in the United States for 2013 are:

  • About 238,590 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed
  • About 29,720 men will die of prostate cancer

Additional technical information:

  1. Optical coherence tomography as a method for identifying benign and malignant microscopic structures in the prostate gland
 

In the OCT image on the left, the layers of the normal tissue
are evident.  In the OCT image on the right, the horizontal
layering has given way to tumor-caused growth.

OCT images have been shown to have a high correlation with
the results found in biopsy samples, and thus could
reduce the need to remove tissue.