An optical biopsy system with miniaturized Raman and spectral imaging probes; in vivo animal and ex vivo clinical application studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT An optical biopsy system which equips miniaturized Raman probes, a miniaturized endoscope and a fluorescent image probe has been developed for in vivo studies of live experimental animals. The present report describes basic optical properties of the system and its application studies for in vivo cancer model animals and ex vivo human cancer tissues. It was developed two types of miniaturized Raman probes, micro Raman probe (MRP) made of optical fibers and ball lens hollow optical fiber Raman probe (BHRP) made of single hollow optical fiber (HOF) with a ball lens. The former has rather large working distance (WD), up to one millimeter. The latter has small WD (~300P m) which depends on the focal length of the ball lens. Use of multiple probes with different WD allows one to obtain detailed information of subsurface tissues in the totally noninvasive manner. The probe is enough narrow to be inserted into a biopsy needle (~19G), for observations of the lesion at deeper inside bodies. The miniaturized endoscope has been applied to observe progression of a stomach cancer in the same rat lesion. It was succeeded to visualize structure of non-stained cancer tissue in live model animals by the fluorescent im age technique. The system was also applied to ex vivo studies of human breast and stomach cancers. Keywords: Raman spectroscopy, fluorescence, miniaturized Raman probe, in vivo measurement, hollow optical fiber