Differentiation of healthy and malignant brain tissues using terahertz pulsed spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography

Abstract

Intraoperative diagnosis of brain tumors remains a challenging problem of modern neurosurgery. A complete resection of tumor is the most important factor, determining an efficiency of its treatment, while an incomplete resection, caused by inaccurate detection of tumor margins, increases a probability of the tumor recurrence. The existing methods of the intraoperative neurodiagnosis of tumors are plagued with limited sensitivity and specificity; they remain laborious, time-consuming and/or rather expensive. Therefore, the development of novel methods for the intraoperative diagnosis of gliomas relying on modern instruments of medical imaging is a topical problem of medicine, physics, and engineering. In our research, we studied the ability of dual-modality imaging that combines such methods as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and terahertz (THz) pulsed spectroscopy, for intraoperative diagnosis of brain tumors with a strong emphasize on a human brain gliomas. We performed experimental studies of the frequency-dependent THz dielectric properties and OCT imaging of healthy (intact) and pathological brain tissues ex vivo in order to analyze the prospect for differentiation between tissue classes. The observed results highlight a potential of the considered instruments in the label-free intraoperative neurodiagnostics.