RESUMO
Breast cancer frequency in human and other mammal female populations has worryingly increased lately. The acute necessity for taxonomy of the aetiological factors along with seeking for new diagnostic tools and therapy procedures aimed at reducing mortality have yielded in an intense research effort worldwide. Surgery is a regular method to counteract extensive development of breast cancer and prevent metastases provided that negative surgical margins are achieved. This highly technical challenge requires fast, extremely sensitive and selective discrimination between malignant and benign tissues even down to molecular level. The particular advantages of Raman spectroscopy, such as high chemical specificity, and the ability to measure raw samples and optical responses in the visible or near-infrared spectral range, have recently recommended it as a means with elevated potential in precise diagnostic in oncology surgery. This review spans mainly the latter 10 years of exceptional efforts of scientists implementing Raman spectroscopy as a nearly real-time diagnostic tool for clean margins assessment in mastectomy and lumpectomy. Although greatly contributing to medical discoveries for the wealth of humanity, animals as patients have benefitted less from advances in surgery diagnostic using Raman spectroscopy. This work also dedicates a few lines to applications of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy in veterinary oncological surgery.
RESUMO
Bowen's disease is a neoplastic skin disease, known as squamous cell carcinoma in situ. The treatment options for Bowen's disease are: cryotherapy, curettage, surgery, topical therapy and radiotherapy. In the past recent years, photodynamic therapy was used as a new treatment method. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the results of clinical and research studies with respect to the photodynamic therapy of Bowen's disease. A search of three databases was conducted using specific keywords and explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study of photosensitizers, light sources and their efficacy in photodynamic therapy of Bowen's disease. Two photosensitizers have been used mainly for photodynamic therapy of Bowen's disease therapy: δ-aminolevulinic acid and methyl aminolevulinate. These photosensitizers have been activated with both coherent (lasers) and non-coherent (lamps and LEDs) light sources. Fluence has been set in a large domain (10-240 J/cm(2)) and irradiance was 0.23-100 mW/cm(2). All these light sources have the same efficacy. The high response rates were obtained using methyl aminolevulinate and light emitting diode as light source. These results have demonstrated that photodynamic therapy using methyl aminolevulinate as photosensitizer could be considered as one of the first therapeutic options for Bowen' disease.
