Analysis of quantitative phase obtained by digital holography on H&E-stained pathological samples

Abstract

The application of digital holography in cell imaging is gaining attraction as it gives quantitative information related to optical thickness without the need for staining. In contrast, conventional pathology examination uses tissues or cells that are stained to visualize the morphological structure or molecular expression with color. However, the relationship between color information and quantitative phase inside histopathology specimen is not yet well understood. In this study, we developed a system to capture both a color image and digital hologram, and those of H&E (hematoxylin and eosin)-stained liver tissue were acquired. Then, we calculated and analyzed the relationship between the textural features inside the color and phase images for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) histopathological specimen. Upon experimental investigation, we found that gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) textural features in phase images are useful for discriminating cancer and normal tissue, and varies between HCC grades which bring the possibility to be utilized for HCC diagnosis or classification without staining procedure.