Diagnosis of uterine cervix cancer using Müller polarimetry: a comparison with histopathology

Abstract

Today around 275000 women a year in the world keep dying from the cancer of uterine cervix due to the difficulty to meet the logistic requirements of an organized screening in the developing world. Polarimetric imaging is a new promising technique with a tremendous potential for applications in biomedical diagnostics: it is sensitive to slight morphological changes in tissues, can provide wide field images for the screening and requires light sources such as a LED for example. This work intends to characterize the polarimetric response of the uterine cervix in its healthy and pathological states. An extensive series of ex-vivo measurements is in progress the Kremlin Bicêtre hospital near Paris using an imaging multispectral Mueller polarimeter in backscattering configuration. The goal of this study is to evaluate the performances of polarimetric imaging technique in terms of sensitivity and specificity for the detection of healthy epithelia (Healthy Squamous epithelium and Malpighian Metaplasia) with respect to the diagnosis provided by pathologists from histology slides as the "gold standard". We show that, at λ=550nm, performances as high as 62% sensitivity and 64% specificity are achieved by optimizing a simple threshold on the scalar retardance values.

Ex vivoMueller polarimetric imaging of the uterine cervix: a first statistical evaluation

“…For an accurate histopathological mapping of the precancerous lesions in the polarimetric images, a special procedure has been designed, as described in detail in Ref. 22. Before the polarimetric measurements, superficial precuts were made on the fixed sample to mark the approximate position of the future histological slides.…”

“…Histological mapping is used to compare the measured polarimetric contrasts (obtained from the retardance and depolarization images) to the "gold standard" diagnosis provided by the pathologist. In a previous study, 22 a statistical population of pixels corresponding to the projected marked lines was considered. This projection method suffers from two main drawbacks.…”