Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Electro-Optic Engineering, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel.
J Biomed Opt. 2011 Aug;16(8):086008. doi: 10.1117/1.3609003.
Skin cancer diagnosis depends not only on histopathological examination but also on visual inspection before and after the excision of suspected lesion. Neoplasm is accompanied with changes in birefringence of collagen, pleomorphicity, and hyperchromatic state of epithelial nuclei. These phenomena can be measured by spectral and polarization changes of light backscattered by the examined tissue. A new differential spectropolarimetric system is proposed using liquid crystal devices, one as a tunable filter and the other as a polarization rotator, both operating at wide spectral ranges from the visible to the near-infrared. Since collagen's fibrils texture orientation depends on its location in the skin and since it is not well organized, our system scans the bipolarization states by continuously rotating the linearly polarized light incident on a skin lesion, and collecting differential contrasts between sequenced images when simultaneously averaging the statistical readout of a video camera. This noninvasive method emphasizes areas on skin where the neoplasm, or tumor, minimizes the statistical polarization change of the scattered light from the lesion. The module can be considered as an assistant tool for epiluminescence microscopy. Images of skin tumors were captured in vivo before the patients having their surgery and compared to histopathological results.
皮肤癌的诊断不仅依赖于组织病理学检查，还依赖于切除可疑病变前后的目视检查。肿瘤伴随着胶原双折射、多形性和上皮核深染状态的变化。这些现象可以通过被检查组织的光背散射的光谱和偏振变化来测量。提出了一种使用液晶器件的新型差分光谱偏振系统，一个作为可调滤波器，另一个作为偏振旋转器，两者都在从可见到近红外的宽光谱范围内工作。由于胶原纤维的纹理方向取决于其在皮肤中的位置，并且组织排列不规则，因此我们的系统通过连续旋转入射到皮肤病变上的线性偏振光来扫描双折射状态，并在同时平均视频摄像机的统计读数时，对顺序图像之间的差分对比度进行采集。这种非侵入性方法强调了皮肤中肿瘤或癌症区域，使病变处散射光的统计偏振变化最小化。该模块可以被视为微光显微镜的辅助工具。在患者进行手术前，对皮肤肿瘤的图像进行了体内采集，并与组织病理学结果进行了比较。
