Abstract

We present an innovative technique for simultaneous measurement of the angular and spectral distributions of light backscattered by biological cells and tissues. The intensities of light scattered to different angular regions are due to scatterers of different sizes. We exploit this fact to study scattering from particles smaller than the wavelength of light used, even when they are mixed with larger particles. We show that the scattering from sub-cellular structure in normal, precancerous, and cancerous human cells is best fitted to inverse power-law distributions for the sizes of the scattering objects, and propose that the distribution of scattering objects may be different in normal versus cancerous cells.

© 2002 Optical Society of America