Multispectral Mueller polarimetric imaging detecting residual cancer and cancer regression after neoadjuvant treatment for colorectal carcinomas

Abstract

Abstract. This work is devoted to a first exploration of Mueller polarimetric imaging for the detection of residual cancer after neoadjuvant treatment for the rectum. Three samples of colorectal carcinomas treated by radiochemotherapy together with one untreated sample are analyzed ex vivo before fixation in formalin by using a multispectral Mueller polarimetric imaging system operated from 500 to 700 nm. The Mueller images, analyzed using the Lu-Chipmann decomposition, show negligible diattenuation and retardation. The nonirradiated rectum exhibits a variation of depolarization with cancer evolution stage. At all wavelengths on irradiated samples, the contrast between the footprint of the initial tumor and surrounding healthy tissue is found to be much smaller for complete tumor regression than when a residual tumor is present, even at volume fractions of the order of 5%. This high sensitivity is attributed to the modification of stromal collagen induced by the cancer. The depolarization contrast between treated cancer and healthy tissue is found to increase monotonously with the volume fraction of residual cancer in the red part of the spectrum. Polarimetric imaging is a promising technique for detecting short-time small residual cancers, which is valuable information for pathological diagnosis and patient management by clinicians.

Quantitatively characterizing the microstructural features of breast ductal carcinoma tissues in different progression stages by Mueller matrix microscope

“…The MMPD method proposed by Lu and Chipman is based on the three main interactions between the polarized light and media: diattenuation (D), retardation (δ), and depolarization (Δ) [32]. The MMPD parameters representing the polarization properties are not sensitive to the azimuthal orientation of the sample and have been applied to studies of various cancerous tissues including the detection of cervical cancer [33], colon cancer [23], and skin cancer [21]. In this study, we use the linear retardance (δ) and its orientation angle (θ), which can be derived from the decomposed Mueller matrix (M) shown as Eq.…”

“…The previous literature shows that more than 85% of cancers originate from the superficial epithelium, which means that polarization imaging methods have great potential in screening and identifying cancer at an early stage [19,20]. Therefore, Mueller matrix polarimetry has been used to assist the diagnosis of various cancerous tissues, such as skin cancer [21], cervical cancer [22], colon cancer [23], liver cancer [24,25], and so on [26,27]. Recently, we have designed a Mueller matrix microscope by adding a polarization state generator and analyzer (PSG and PSA) to a commercial transmission-light microscope and applied it to detect human liver and cervical cancerous tissues with fibrosis [24,25].…”

Characterizing microstructures of cancerous tissues using multispectral transformed Mueller matrix polarization parameters

“…Apart from polarization, spectral features of the scattered light also carry information on the microstructure of biological samples, therefore can be applied in diagnosis of cancerous tissues [19]. Studies have shown that combining polarization and spectral techniques can provide more powerful tools for cancer diagnosis [20][21][22][23][24].…”

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…The characteristic polarization information of interest is carried by a 4 3 4 matrix named a Mueller matrix and this can be experimentally obtained from Mueller polarimetry and polarimetric imaging. In recent years, an increasing number of biomedical applications of Mueller polarimetric imaging techniques have been proposed [5], e. g. oral cancerous legion detection [13], cervical cancer and colon cancer detection and staging [12,[14][15][16][17][18][19], assessment of cancer therapy [20], partial bladder obstruction diagnosis [21], guiding mass spectrometry for instant pathology [22], characterizing collagen fibres [23], and these have demonstrated advantages over polarization blind imaging.…”