Surgical polarimetric endoscopy for the detection of laryngeal cancer

Abstract

The standard-of-care for the detection of laryngeal pathologies involves distinguishing suspicious lesions from surrounding healthy tissue via contrasts in colour and texture captured by white-light endoscopy. However, the technique is insufficiently sensitive and thus leads to unsatisfactory rates of false negatives. Here we show that laryngeal lesions can be better detected in real time by taking advantage of differences in the light-polarization properties of cancer and healthy tissues. By measuring differences in polarized-light retardance and depolarization, the technique, which we named ‘surgical polarimetric endoscopy’ (SPE), generates about one-order-of-magnitude greater contrast than white-light endoscopy, and hence allows for the better discrimination of cancerous lesions, as we show with patients diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. Polarimetric imaging of excised and stained slices of laryngeal tissue indicated that changes in the retardance of polarized light can be largely attributed to architectural features of the tissue. We also assessed SPE to aid routine transoral laser surgery for the removal of a cancerous lesion, indicating that SPE can complement white-light endoscopy for the detection of laryngeal cancer.

Spatial analysis of polarimetric images to enhance near-surface sampling sensitivity: feasibility in demineralized teeth and other tissue-like media

“…Indeed, a powerful polarimetric technique may be formed, which combines this added cellular probing capability to the well-demonstrated collagen sensing via polarization retardance imaging. 82 , 83 …”

Chiral Conjugated Molecular Assemblies Interact with Substances and Light

“…Benefiting from chiral asymmetry property, chiral materials can generally demonstrate optical rotatory dispersion, circular dichroism (CD), circular polarized luminescence, nonlinear optical effect, chiral-induced spin selectivity, and so forth (Figure ). The spatial inversion symmetry breaking enables chiral materials to exhibit novel functionalities, which is absent in their achiral counterparts, especially when being applied in electronic devices. , More importantly, they show great advantages in simplifying the design of electronic devices, such as eliminating the need for separate linear polarizers and phase retarders in circularly polarized light (CPL) detectors and spin light-emitting diode, eliminating the need for the applied magnetic field or polarized ferromagnetic contacts in the spintronic-based devices. − Therefore, the development of chiral materials and devices may advance a wide range of technological applications in sensing, detection, imaging, communication, and so on. − …”

Analysis and correction of backscattering polarimetric aberration induced by tissue surface geometry: a pilot ex-vivo study

“…Nowadays, Mueller matrix (MM) is one of the most popular mathematical descriptions of sample's polarization properties [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] . Specifically, for in-vivo tissue imaging, polarimetric endoscopy provides a more comprehensive characterization of tissue structures compared to traditional white-light endoscopy [12][13][14][15] . However, most human internal cavities have undulating surfaces, inducing an inescapable occurrence of oblique incidence 16 .…”