A Review of Spectroscopic and Non-Spectroscopic Techniques for Diagnosing Breast Cancer

Abstract

Malignancy, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, accounts for 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Around 1 out of 6 deaths are the direct result of the malignancy. Clinicians claim that age and breast density are two preliminary factors increasing the risk of cancer. The mortality rate brought about by malignant growth in low and high income countries is, for the most part, around 70%. Imaging techniques play a vital role in the detection, and staging, thereby helping in treatment decision making. This review paper presents a comprehensive survey involving a literature study about the evolution and efficacy of various breast cancer detection techniques. This work studies various procedures of imaging techniques such as mammograms, ultrasound, MRI, PET, CT, Terahertz Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy, Optical coherence Tomography, Mass spectroscopy, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, and Infrared Thermography. Since cancer is a complicated illness with diverse pathophysiologies, numerous modifications of the fundamental detection approach employed in each of these modalities have been performed throughout the years to increase the detection efficiency. This paper covers basic preliminary results with FFPE breast cancer blocks of malignant and normal subjects using THz Techniques that are presented as proof of concept to carry out further research.

Keywords: Breast cancer; FFPE samples; non-spectroscopic techniques; optical properties; spectroscopic techniques; terahertz-TDS.