Head and Neck Cancer

Optical biopsy techniques can provide immediate in vivo diagnosis of suspicious oral lesions. Other advantages include their non-invasive nature and reducing patient stress and anxiety while waiting for the diagnosis. Some of these techniques have already been incorporated into clinical practice and have become indispensable tools in oral dysplasia clinics (e.g. fluorescence spectroscopy); others continue to be applied in clinical research studies and results show great promise for their use in clinical practice in the near future (e.g. elastic scattering spectroscopy, microendoscopy and optical coherence tomography).1–8