Hyperspectral Imaging Using Flexible Endoscopy for Laryngeal Cancer Detection

Abstract

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is increasingly gaining acceptance in the medical field. Up until now, HSI has been used in conjunction with rigid endoscopy to detect cancer in vivo. The logical next step is to pair HSI with flexible endoscopy, since it improves access to hard-to-reach areas. While the flexible endoscope’s fiber optic cables provide the advantage of flexibility, they also introduce an interfering honeycomb-like pattern onto images. Due to the substantial impact this pattern has on locating cancerous tissue, it must be removed before the HS data can be further processed. Thereby, the loss of information is to minimize avoiding the suppression of small-area variations of pixel values. We have developed a system that uses flexible endoscopy to record HS cubes of the larynx and designed a special filtering technique to remove the honeycomb-like pattern with minimal loss of information. We have confirmed its feasibility by comparing it to conventional filtering techniques using an objective metric and by applying unsupervised and supervised classifications to raw and pre-processed HS cubes. Compared to conventional techniques, our method successfully removes the honeycomb-like pattern and considerably improves classification performance, while preserving image details.

Most Relevant Spectral Bands Identification for Brain Cancer Detection Using Hyperspectral Imaging

“…In particular, HSI has started to achieve promising results in the recent years with respect to cancer detection through the utilization of cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms [4,[19][20][21]. Several types of cancer have been investigated using HSI including both in vivo and ex vivo tissue samples, such as gastric and colon cancer [22][23][24][25], breast cancer [26,27], head and neck cancer [28][29][30][31][32][33], and brain cancer [34][35][36], among others.…”

Fully convolutional networks in multimodal nonlinear microscopy images for automated detection of head and neck carcinoma: Pilot study

“…The in vivo application in combination with automated imaging analysis would make it possible in the future to display the results into a postprocessed image guiding the surgeon during surgery in real time. Such an application has already been introduced for hyperspectral imaging using flexible endoscopy for laryngeal cancer detection …”

Intraoperative multispectral and hyperspectral label‐free imaging: A systematic review of in vivo clinical studies

“…The second clinical focus of using intraoperative HSI has been to guide tumour resection. The feasibility of using HSI as a diagnostic technique for cancer has been comprehensively evaluated in multiple preclinical animal models and several recent studies have also demonstrated its use in assessing tumour margins in ex vivo tissue in the operating room [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][44][45][46][47][48]. Fewer studies have reported the in vivo use of HSI during surgery but several groups have used HSI to highlight subtle changes in exogenous fluorescence [53,54,69].…”

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