Department of Electronic Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Phys Med Biol. 2010 Dec 21;55(24):7587-96. doi: 10.1088/0031-9155/55/24/013. Epub 2010 Nov 19.
We have previously demonstrated that terahertz pulsed imaging is able to distinguish between rat tissues from different healthy organs. In this paper we report our measurements of healthy and cirrhotic liver tissues using terahertz reflection spectroscopy. The water content of the fresh tissue samples was also measured in order to investigate the correlations between the terahertz properties, water content, structural changes and cirrhosis. Finally, the samples were fixed in formalin to determine whether water was the sole source of image contrast in this study. We found that the cirrhotic tissue had a higher water content and absorption coefficient than the normal tissue and that even after formalin fixing there were significant differences between the normal and cirrhotic tissues' terahertz properties. Our results show that terahertz pulsed imaging can distinguish between healthy and diseased tissue due to differences in absorption originating from both water content and tissue structure.
我们之前已经证明，太赫兹脉冲成像能够区分来自不同健康器官的大鼠组织。在本文中，我们报告了使用太赫兹反射光谱测量健康和肝硬化肝脏组织的结果。为了研究太赫兹特性、含水量、结构变化和肝硬化之间的相关性，我们还测量了新鲜组织样本的含水量。最后，将样本固定在福尔马林中，以确定在本研究中是否只有水是图像对比的唯一来源。我们发现，肝硬化组织的含水量和吸收系数高于正常组织，即使在福尔马林固定后，正常组织和肝硬化组织的太赫兹特性仍存在显著差异。我们的结果表明，太赫兹脉冲成像可以区分健康组织和患病组织，这是由于水含量和组织结构差异引起的吸收差异所致。
