Skin cancer is one of the main health issues affecting the entire population as the most commonly seen cancer. Early diagnosis of skin cancer is crucial, as five-year survival rates of “early detection of regional nonmetastatic cutaneous melanomas” is reported to be 98% while it drops to 16% for “distant and metastatic melanomas”. Malignancy diagnosis is done initially by dermatologists by visual inspection which often is open to misinterpretations between dysplastic nevi and melanoma. Therefore, the presence of melanoma is confirmed with histopathology which requires performing a biopsy, a very invasive procedure. Recently, it has been an effort to develop non-invasive methods that can be used for fast and reliable diagnosis of melanoma, including dielectric probe, pen-sized Raman spectroscopy probe, diffuse reflectance spectroscopic and laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopic approaches. However, due to lack of their specificity none of these novel methods provides sufficient sensitivity for early diagnosis and none of them is suitable for detection of unique biomarkers of skin cancer. Therefore novel, innovative, and reliable techniques that can be used for fast and non-invasive early diagnosis of skin cancer are in high demand. The main objective of the project is to develop a handheld probe that can be used directly on the skin and can be coupled with on-line mass spectrometric detection for fast and reliable diagnosis of skin cancer, here shown in mice model. As one of the most important health problems and being the most common cancer, the probe may provide in future a new platform for fast diagnosis of the skin cancer.
