 On May 5, 2008, a large collaboration headed by Prof. Backman (with Prof. Taflove as a co-investigator) was awarded a five-year, $7.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue this biophotonics technology to develop a noninvasive test for population-wide colon cancer screening.FDTD modeling has helped establish the fundamental physics foundation of Prof. Backman's spectroscopic microscopy technique for early detection of human cancers.Work has progressed from the early FDTD studies reported in Dec. 2008 in "Proc.