Study of acetowhitening method to distinguish normal and cancerous tissue at cellular level

A time-resolved 3-channel data acquisition system is designed to study the temporal characteristics of acetowhitening at cellular level. Both normal and cancerous cells from the ectocervical tissue are studied and the intensity of the backscattering light from the monolayer cells is recorded and analyzed. It is found that the intensity decay courses of normal and cancerous cells are quite different in the line shape. Double-exponential decay model is used to fit the curves and the calculated time constant is used to quantitatively distinguish the normal and cancerous cells. The time constant of cancerous cells is longer than that of normal cells when the same concentration of acetic acid is used. The study shows the potential of this method to distinguish normal and cancerous tissues from the decay course of acetowhitening. The quantification of the acetowhitening effect could be potentially used for the objective detection of neoplastic lesions at cervical tissue.