Screening of Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia based on Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy : Issues and Challenges.

Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) is the precancerous stage of cervical cancer. Accurate and straightforward CIN screening and subsequent treatment and management of early detected CIN highly reduce the occurrence of cervical cancer, which is the 4th most common cancer among women. Bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) has been proposed as a CIN screening method since it is varied in the electrical characteristics depending on the progression of CIN. Before applying the BIS system, including a multi-electrode probe to in-vivo tissue, we wanted to evaluate it on the in-vitro cervical tissues obtained from loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP). Unfortunately, the measurement accuracy of in-vitro cervical tissues is highly determined by the size, the presence or absence of mucus, and the condition of the surface of tissue samples. This study presents a brief investigation into the technical issues during the impedance measurements for tissue samples. A few methods, including model fitting, gain adjustment, and saline calibration, have been introduced to check measurement quality using our newly proposed multi-electrode probe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]