Stromal optical properties: differentiating normal and cancerous stroma

This work reports on the measurement of optical properties from nine normal and cancerous human esophageal stroma pairs using reflectance-based confocal microscopy. It was found that the scattering coefficient of cancerous stroma is significantly lower than that of normal stroma. The results suggest that the decreased scattering in cancerous stroma may provide a possible indicator for differentiating normal and cancerous stroma.