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Integrated Spectrometer for Spectral Tissue Sensing

Minimally-invasive image-guided procedures – such as taking biopsies in screening suspicious nodules for cancerous tumours – are becoming increasingly important in clinical practice. Today, physicians are severely hampered by the lack of precision of the needle tip location during an intervention.


Real-time tissue-characterization feedback at the device tip during these procedures can greatly reduce false negatives, significantly improve the outcome of diagnosis and treatment, and reduce the cost of oncology treatment. Spectral tissue sensing using photonic needles has the promise to be a valuable tool for screening tumours, as shown by several clinical studies.

However, for widespread adoption the cost and size of these photonic needle systems – in particular the spectrometer console – need to be improved dramatically in order to make it commercially viable for also screening at point of care locations such as physicians’ offices and outpatient centres. So far, it has been very difficult to realize a low-cost miniature system due to three key challenges.

01/01/2015-31/12/2017

More information : http://www.inspect2020.eu/

This project is linked to the B-PHOT research track: