Distinguishing Cancer and Normal Breast Tissue Autofluorescence Using Continuous Wavelet Transform

We study the spectral features of the polarized fluorescence spectra of normal and cancerous human breast tissues through continuous wavelet transform, which clearly identifies distinguishing features between the tissue types. After pinpointing these robust features in the wavelet scalogram, we systematically study the autocorrelation property of the wavelet coefficients of the fluorescence spectra, which is found to differentiate normal and malignant tissues with high sensitivity. The intensity difference of parallel and perpendicularly polarized fluorescence spectra is subjected to investigation, since the same is relatively free of the diffusive background.