Today the situation is radically different. Coupled with exciting new concepts in tissue optics, telecom-driven technological advances have yielded noninvasive methods that provide completely new information from tissues. Photon diffusion techniques have painted a novel physiological portrait of the breast that may characterize lesions, chart the progression of disease, and monitor the effectiveness of anticancer therapies. Quantitative NIR optical spectroscopy provides an opportunity for revealing physiological information that is unobtainable by other radiological techniques. Instrumentation is compact and relatively economical, which suggests that the technology will be available to everyone.
Optics plays a role in other areas of medicine.
Technology of the 1960s and 1970s combined with an important clinical need made pulse oximetry broadly available. NIR spectroscopy is similarly poised for growth. The analyzer determines the amplitude and phase of the signal. The same approach can be applied to measurements of tissue absorption and scattering. In such a case, the device under test is a tissue, such as breast tissue.