Team Eyes Infrared Route to Diagnose Endometriosis, Lancaster University Study Reveals

Infrared (IR) spectroscopy could greatly improve the diagnosis of endometriosis, bypassing the need for invasive surgical biopsy, according to a team from from Lancaster University. The team found that tissue from women with the condition carried a distinct IR signature — thus paving the way for routine assessment such as that done for cervical smears. ‘We use spectroscopy as a method of deriving what we call a biochemical cell fingerprint of a tissue sample — and from that we can get an absorption spectrum associated with the functionality of the tissue we’ve looked at,’ project lead Dr Francis Martin of Lancaster told The Engineer.