Reflective mesoscopic spectroscopy for noninvasive detection of reflective index alternations at nano-scale

Cancer has been one of the most serious threats to human life. However, there is no substantial improvement in overall treatment of cancer patients. One of the key reasons is the unavailability of convenient method to detect cellular alterations in ultra-early stage of carcinogenesis processes, where genetic aberrations at nano-scale have not yet resulted in histological changes. In this paper, we described an optical method based on reflective mesoscopic spectroscopy for ultra-early cancer detection. According to mesoscopic light transport theory, photons propagating in one dimension (1D) within a weakly disordered medium have the non-self-averaging effect. Reflected signal after 1D propagating is sensitive to any length scale of refractive index fluctuations due to multiple interferences of light waves travelling along 1D trajectory. The principle of mesoscopic spectroscopy for perceiving reflective index fluctuations at length scale of nanometers is introduced. A system for the measurement of reflective mesoscopic spectroscopy based on spatial-incoherence broadband source and spectrometer is established. Simulations on light propagation in cell-emulating model with controlled refractive index distribution are done by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) approach.