Medical needs for translational biophotonics with the focus on Raman-based methods

This report summarizes state-of-the-art biophotonic approaches for unmet needs in medicine with the focus on spontaneous and coherent Raman methods since 2017. Numerous proof-of-principle studies demonstrated how Raman spectroscopy and imaging were applied to classify tissues, delineate tumor borders and detect tumor cells in various disciplines such as histopathology, cytopathology and endoscopy. In some cases, Raman technologies were combined with other modalities such as fluorescence, optical coherence tomography, white light imaging, photoacoustic imaging, optoacoustics and multiphoton microscopy. However, the number of patients and specimens were usually small in these studies. It is concluded that preclinical biophotonic studies using high-throughput instruments are required to collect big data from larger patient cohorts and develop robust classification algorithms for clinical translation.