Abstract
Skin cancer is one of the most common cancers. Melanoma accounts for less than 2% of skin cancer cases but causes a large majority of skin cancer deaths. Early detection of malignant melanoma remains the key factor in saving lives. However, the melanoma diagnosis is still clinically challenging. Here, we developed a confocal photothermal microscope for noninvasive, label-free, three-dimensional imaging of melanoma. The axial resolution of confocal photothermal microscope is ~3 times higher than that of commonly used photothermal microscope. Three-dimensional microscopic distribution of melanin in pigmented lesions of mouse skin is obtained directly with this setup. Classic morphometric and fractal analysis of sixteen 3D images (eight for benign melanoma and eight for malignant) showed a capability of pathology of melanoma: melanin density and size become larger during the melanoma growth, and the melanin distribution also becomes more chaotic and unregulated. The results suggested new options for monitoring the melanoma growth and also for the melanoma diagnosis.
Highlights
PTM, which relies on the detection of local heating induced by sample’s optical absorption, has shown potential in biological imaging and clinical applications
The axial distributions of the point spread functions (PSFs) of Confocal PTM (CPTM) and normal PTM (NPTM) are tested with a sample of 20-nm Gold nanoparticles (GNP)
Compared with the case of NPTM, the PT signal obtained with CPTM has only a single peak in axial direction (Fig. 1(a)), with an enhanced axial resolution defined by FWHM of ~700 nm (blue and red curves in Fig. 1(c)) and an improvement of ~3 times
Summary
PTM, which relies on the detection of local heating induced by sample’s optical absorption, has shown potential in biological imaging and clinical applications. The key advantages of PTM are high sensitivity and no requirement of staining[8,9,10]. It can image nanometer sized absorbers among scatters with high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and in real time[11,12,13]. Confocal PTM (CPTM), which has a detection scheme similar to the confocal microscopy, can help to remove the drawback and improve the axial resolution[14]. 3D microscopic distributions of melanin in benign and malignant melanoma tissue are obtained with this setup. The detection of melanin distributions in melanoma using CPTM can be a new option for melanoma diagnosis
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