NIR Spectroscopy Based Circulating Tumour Cells Detection using Segmentation Technique

Cancer is a malignant growth resulting from uncontrolled cell division taking place in any tissue of the body. More than 100 types of cancers are known till date, some of them being more common in genders such as in case of women, breast cancer is more prevalent whereas in men prostate cancer is quite common. Breast calcifications are small spots of calcium deposits in the breasts and they can occasionally be an early sign of cancer. Because of this the doctor or nurse may suggest to have further tests to check what sort of calcifications do the patients have. At this instant, to describe and analyze the disease in an effective manner, a technology was proposed using Near-infrared sensor for the detection of cancer cells from the red blood cells. In this improved system, blood phantoms of different patients were used as samples and the output from the NIR sensor after exposure to the samples was recorded graphically. The obtained signals were then segmented using techniques like Short Time Fourier Transform as a function and Wavelet transform. Comparison was made among the results of the above techniques and the effective and precise details were obtained from these results.