Patent ID: 8340745

Claim:
A quantitative method for determining a tissue condition, comprising: measuring, in vivo, temporal alterations of an optical property of a tissue at a plurality of spatial locations of the tissue, wherein the temporal alterations are provoked by application of a biomarker to the tissue; calculating a dynamic optical curve from the measured optical property data for each spatial location in the plurality of spatial locations; determining values of a set of dynamic optical parameters from the dynamic optical curve for each spatial location in the plurality of spatial locations; and determining a tissue condition using the determined values of the set of dynamic optical parameters and reference values for the set of dynamic optical parameters at each spatial location in the plurality of spatial locations; wherein the tissue is an epithelial tissue; and wherein the tissue condition is selected from the group consisting of normal tissue, cervical neoplasia, HPV infection, dysplasia, pathologic, cancerous and precancerous, wherein the set of reference values are determined by steps comprising: correlating values for a plurality of dynamic optical parameters of a reference tissue sample, obtained in vivo, with a diagnosis of a tissue condition of the reference tissue sample, obtained by an in vitro diagnostic test, for a statistically significant number of tissue samples; and determining, on the basis of said correlations, a set of dynamic optical parameters for discriminating between tissue conditions, a value range of each dynamic optical parameter in the set of dynamic optical parameters, and a cut-off value for each dynamic optical parameter in the set of dynamic optical parameters that discriminates between various conditions of tissue; wherein the cut-off values are reference values to discriminate between tissue conditions including normal, pathologic, and cancerous, and wherein the cut-off value of each dynamic optical parameter is such that the sensitivity and the specificity of the dynamic optical parameter are approximately the same.