Distinguishing autofluorescence of normal, benign, and cancerous breast tissues through wavelet domain correlation studies

Abstract

Using the multiresolution ability of wavelets and effectiveness of singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify statistically robust parameters, we find a number of local and global features, capturing spectral correlations in the co- and cross-polarized channels, at different scales (of human breast tissues). The copolarized component, being sensitive to intrinsic fluorescence, shows different behavior for normal, benign, and cancerous tissues, in the emission domain of known fluorophores, whereas the perpendicular component, being more prone to the diffusive effect of scattering, points out differences in the Kernel-Smoother density estimate employed to the principal components, between malignant, normal, and benign tissues. The eigenvectors, corresponding to the dominant eigenvalues of the correlation matrix in SVD, also exhibit significant differences between the three tissue types, which clearly reflects the differences in the spectral correlation behavior. Interestingly, the most significant distinguishing feature manifests in the perpendicular component, corresponding to porphyrin emission range in the cancerous tissue. The fact that perpendicular component is strongly influenced by depolarization, and porphyrin emissions in cancerous tissue has been found to be strongly depolarized, may be the possible cause of the above observation.