Abstract
We report the development and implementation of a unique integrated Mueller-matrix (MM) near-infrared (NIR) imaging and Mueller-matrix point-wise diffuse reflectance (DR) spectroscopy technique for improving colonic cancer detection and diagnosis. Point-wise MM DR spectra can be acquired from any suspicious tissue areas indicated by MM imaging. A total of 30 paired colonic tissue specimens (normal vs. cancer) were measured using the integrated MM imaging and point-wise MM DR spectroscopy system. Polar decomposition algorithms are employed on the acquired images and spectra to derive three polarization metrics including depolarization, diattentuation and retardance for colonic tissue characterization. The decomposition results show that tissue depolarization and retardance are significantly decreased (p<0.001, paired 2-sided Student's t-test, n = 30); while the tissue diattentuation is significantly increased (p<0.001, paired 2-sided Student's t-test, n = 30) associated with colonic cancer. Further partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and leave-one tissue site-out, cross validation (LOSCV) show that the combination of the three polarization metrics provide the best diagnostic accuracy of 95.0% (sensitivity: 93.3%, and specificity: 96.7%) compared to either of the three polarization metrics (sensitivities of 93.3%, 83.3%, and 80.0%; and specificities of 90.0%, 96.7%, and 80.0%, respectively, for the depolarization, diattentuation and retardance metrics) for colonic cancer detection. This work suggests that the integrated MM NIR imaging and point-wise MM NIR diffuse reflectance spectroscopy has the potential to improve the early detection and diagnosis of malignant lesions in the colon.
Highlights
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed malignancy in males and the second in females worldwide, with an estimated 1.4 million cases and 693,900 deaths occurring in 2012 [1]
We report on the development of a unique integrated Mueller-Matrix NIR imaging and pointwise Mueller-Matrix spectroscopy system for colonic tissue diagnosis and characterization
We found the existence of non-diagonal Mueller-Matrix images (i.e., m34, and m43), demonstrating the anisotropy of colonic tissues
Summary
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed malignancy in males and the second in females worldwide, with an estimated 1.4 million cases and 693,900 deaths occurring in 2012 [1]. In Singapore, CRC has become the most frequent cancer with a total of 9,324 new cases diagnosed from 2010 to 2014 [2]. Some individuals are still diagnosed with CRC despite recent colonoscopy [3]. This is probably because conventional WLR colonoscopy heavily relies on the visualization of gross mucosal features associated with neoplastic transformation [4]. The current approach for colonic tissue diagnosis is clinically labor intensive and a burden to the patients. There is a need to develop advanced optical diagnostic techniques for objective diagnosis and characterization of colonic tissue
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