Toward the development of portable light emitting diode‐based polarization spectroscopy tools for breast cancer diagnosis

Abstract

A robust, affordable and portable light emitting diode‐based diagnostic tools (POLS‐NIRDx) using a polarization‐sensitive (linear as well as circular polarization) technique were designed and developed to quantify the degree of linear polarization (DOLP), degree of circular polarization (DOCP). The study was performed on malignant (invasive ductal carcinoma) and adjacent normal ex‐vivo biopsy tissues excised from N = 10 patients at the operating wavelengths of 850 and 940 nm. The average DOLP and DOCP values were lower for malignant than adjacent normal while operating at 850 and 940 nm. The highest accuracy was observed for DOLP (100%) and DOCP (80%) while operating at 850 nm, which reduced (80% for DOLP and 65% for DOCP) at 940 nm. This pilot study can be utilized as a differentiating factor to delineate malignant tissues from adjacent normal tissues.

Toward the development of a polarimetric tool to diagnose the fibrotic human ventricular myocardium

“…11 Bickel et al 12 demonstrated that polarization in light scattering could be used as an effective tool in biological study. Various biological tissues, including tissues from cardiac muscle, brain, liver, kidney cortex, loin muscle, and tendon of pigs, [13][14][15][16] tissues from heart, brain, retina, kidney, and spleen of rats, 17 cardiac tissues of Lewis rats, 18,19 human breast cancer tissues, [20][21][22] and invasive breast cancer specimens, [23][24][25] have been characterized using a wide variety of optical modalities such as polarimetric light microscopy (PLM), [23][24][25] linear polarization spectroscopy, [23][24][25] Mueller polarimetry, 26 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), [20][21][22]27 and optical coherence tomography (OCT). 13,14 Sprenger et al 23 devised a quantitative approach for assessing the tumor's stroma ratio by combining PLM and linear polarization in breast cancer specimens.…”

“…29 Also, the use of polarized light to probe the tissue has been proved to be a quick and effective way for non-invasive tissue diagnostics. 30 Kamal et al 22 designed a small, inexpensive, and easy-to-use system (POLS-NIRDx) for performing polarization-sensitive NIRS to distinguish between the malignant and the adjacent normal formalin-fixed breast biopsy tissues by quantifying the degree of linear polarization (DOLP) and degree of circular polarization (DOCP), both at 850 and 940 nm.…”

“…The tool is capable of quantifying the DOLP and accurately distinguishing diseased myocardial tissues from control. An operating wavelength of 850 nm is chosen based on the recent findings, [20][21][22] where 850 nm showed the highest statistical significance in quantifying tissue anisotropy. The developed tool might be utilized in conjunction with endomyocardial biopsy to guide cardiologists to distinguish between healthy and fibrotic heart tissues.…”