Abstract
We have developed a novel technique to quantify submicron scale mass density fluctuations in weakly disordered heterogeneous optical media using confocal fluorescence microscopy. Our method is based on the numerical evaluation of the light localization properties of an 'optical lattice' constructed from the pixel intensity distributions of images obtained with confocal fluorescence microscopy. Here we demonstrate that the technique reveals differences in the mass density fluctuations of the fluorescently labeled molecules between normal and cancer cells, and that it has the potential to quantify the degree of malignancy of cancer cells. Potential applications of the technique to other disease situations or characterizing disordered samples are also discussed.
Highlights
Analyzing the structural disorder of weakly disordered optical media has many applications, in particular determining the physical properties of the samples such as mass density variations, or refractive index variation
We have developed a novel method based on light localization analysis to quantify refractive index fluctuations or mass density fluctuations of fluorescently labeled molecules, in weakly disordered heterogeneous optical system, using confocal fluorescence microscopy imaging
Our results show that the confocal fluorescence micrographs can be efficiently used to quantify refractive index fluctuations, or the mass density fluctuations, in nuclear DNA using the developed technique
Summary
Analyzing the structural disorder of weakly disordered optical media has many applications, in particular determining the physical properties of the samples such as mass density variations, or refractive index variation. Some typical examples of such media include polymers, thin dielectric films, cells and tissues, etc The characterization of these disordered media becomes more complicated if the system has spatial heterogeneity involving many kinds of spatial correlation decay length scales within the sample, for example as in biological cells [1,2]. In principle, the light transport and localization analyses of the cells can be a useful method to extract information about the physical properties of the cells Such an approach has been shown to have practical applications, such as in the detection of early carcinogenesis [5,6,7]. These developments have created new avenues for applications of “mesoscopic physics” based optical transport analysis [9,10,11] to understand disease processes in biological cells
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