Abstract
Brillouin spectroscopy has recently gained considerable interest within the biomedical field as an innovative tool to study mechanical properties in biology. The Brillouin effect is based on the inelastic scattering of photons caused by their interaction with thermodynamically driven acoustic modes or phonons and it is highly dependent on the material’s elasticity. Therefore, Brillouin is a contactless, label-free optic approach to elastic and viscoelastic analysis that has enabled unprecedented analysis of ex vivo and in vivo mechanical behavior of several tissues with a micrometric resolution, paving the way to a promising future in clinical diagnosis. Here, we comprehensively review the different studies of this fast-moving field that have been performed up to date to provide a quick guide of the current literature. In addition, we offer a general view of Brillouin’s biomedical potential to encourage its further development to reach its implementation as a feasible, cost-effective pathology diagnostic tool.
Highlights
As the role of mechanical properties of cells and tissues is gaining high relevance in the study of a wide range of biological processes, Brillouin imaging has emerged as a promising tool for the characterization of biological samples in terms of their viscoelastic behavior
The experimental implementation of a Brillouin spectroscopy system is somewhat complicated as the photon–phonon interaction occurs within the material under study and must be described in a reference frame outside the material, namely the laboratory reference frame
The results suggest that Brillouin light scattering (BS) holds valuable potential as a diagnostic and monitoring tool in treating melanoma that would enable physicians to find tumor boundaries with high accuracy [94,95]
Summary
As the role of mechanical properties of cells and tissues is gaining high relevance in the study of a wide range of biological processes, Brillouin imaging has emerged as a promising tool for the characterization of biological samples in terms of their viscoelastic behavior. Conventional optical coherence elastography, which is a clinical tool that measures tissue biomechanics, is very sensitive to environmental vibrations [1]. Brillouin imaging presents a contactless, label-free, non-destructive modality for probing biological samples in the GHz/micron scale and with great potential in clinical diagnosis. The Brillouin light scattering (BS) effect was predicted by Léon Brillouin [2,3] and Leonid I. Mandelstam [4,5,6] independently in 1922 and 1926, respectively. I. Mandelstam had already presented this effect in
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