Label-free identification of intestinal metaplasia in the stomach using multiphoton microscopy

Abstract

The early diagnosis of intestinal metaplasia (IM) in the stomach together with effective therapeutic interventions is crucial to reducing the mortality-rates of the patients associated with gastric cancer. However, it is challenging during conventional white-light endoscopy, and histological analysis remains the ‘gold standard’ for the final diagnosis. Here, we describe a label-free imaging method, multiphoton microscopy (MPM), for the identification of IM in the stomach. It was found that multiphoton imaging provides cellular and subcellular details to the identification of IM from normal gastric tissues. In particular, there is significant difference in the population density of goblet cells between normal and IM gastric tissues, providing substantial potential to become a quantitative intrinsic marker for in vivo clinical diagnosis of early gastric lesions. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the potential of MPM for the identification of IM.

Application of Multiphoton Microscopic Imaging in Study of Gastric Cancer

“… 56 In comparison, TPEF has higher optical sectioning ability but less photobleaching and photodamaging to the intestinal tract of mice. 56 In another study, Wu et al 57 identified goblet cells by imaging normal and intestinal gastric tissues using TPEF. They suggested that normal gastric tissues and intestinal gastric tissues can be distinguished by calculating the total number of goblet cells per unit area, that is, the density of goblet cells.…”

A new method of assessing the surgical margin in rectal carcinoma—using nonlinear optical microscopy

“…Many studies have showed its ability in the detection of digestive tract diseases with high resolution and high sensitivity [8,9]. However, previous publications mainly focused on the identification of pathological changes in gastrointestinal diseases such as stromal fibrosis, intestinal metaplasia, and so on [10][11][12]. To the best of our knowledge, there were no reports about how to use this imaging technique for assessing the surgical margin.…”