Abstract
Dysplastic progression is known to be associated with changes in morphology and internal structure of cells. A detailed assessment of the influence of these changes on cellular scattering response is needed to develop and optimize optical diagnostic techniques. In this study, we first analyzed a set of quantitative histopathologic images from cervical biopsies and we obtained detailed information on morphometric and photometric features of segmented epithelial cell nuclei. Morphometric parameters included average size and eccentricity of the best-fit ellipse. Photometric parameters included optical density measures that can be related to dielectric properties and texture characteristics of the nuclei. These features enabled us to construct realistic three-dimensional computational models of basal, parabasal, intermediate, and superficial cell nuclei that were representative of four diagnostic categories, namely normal (or negative for dysplasia), mild dysplasia, moderate dysplasia, and severe dysplasia or carcinoma in situ. We then employed the finite-difference time-domain method, a popular numerical tool in electromagnetics, to compute the angle-resolved light scattering properties of these representative models. Results indicated that a high degree of variability can characterize a given diagnostic category, but scattering from moderately and severely dysplastic or cancerous nuclei was generally observed to be stronger compared to scattering from normal and mildly dysplastic nuclei. Simulation results also pointed to significant intensity level variations among different epithelial depths. This suggests that intensity changes associated with dysplastic progression need to be analyzed in a depth-dependent manner.
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