Method for analyzing biological specimens by spectral imaging

Abstract

A method for analyzing biological specimens by spectral imaging to provide a medical diagnosis includes obtaining spectral and visual images of biological specimens and registering the images to detect cell abnormalities, pre-cancerous cells, and cancerous cells. This method eliminates the bias and unreliability of diagnoses that is inherent in standard histopathological and other spectral methods. In addition, a method for correcting confounding spectral contributions that are frequently observed in microscopically acquired infrared spectra of cells and tissue includes performing a phase correction on the spectral data. This phase correction method may be used to correct various types of absorption spectra that are contaminated by reflective components.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method executed by a system for analyzing biological specimens by spectral imaging, comprising:
 acquiring a visual image of the biological specimen;   acquiring a spectral image of a biological specimen that includes spectral data from the biological specimen;   performing multivariate analysis of the spectral data to detect spectral differences in the spectral data;   generating a grayscale or pseudo-color image based at least upon the multivariate analysis; and   registering the visual image and the grayscale or pseudo-color spectral image to generate a registered image.   
     
     
         2 . The method of  claim 1 , further comprising:
 detecting cell abnormalities in the biological specimen using the registered image.   
     
     
         3 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein the multivariate analysis of the spectral data comprises one or more of performing unsupervised analysis of the spectral data and performing analysis of the spectral data using a supervised machine learning algorithm.