University of Arkansas, Bell Engineering Center, Department of Electrical Engineering, Fayetteville,, United States.
University of Arkansas, Science and Engineering Building, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Fayet, United States.
J Biomed Opt. 2018 Feb;23(2):1-13. doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.23.2.026004.
This paper investigates terahertz (THz) imaging and classification of freshly excised murine xenograft breast cancer tumors. These tumors are grown via injection of E0771 breast adenocarcinoma cells into the flank of mice maintained on high-fat diet. Within 1 h of excision, the tumor and adjacent tissues are imaged using a pulsed THz system in the reflection mode. The THz images are classified using a statistical Bayesian mixture model with unsupervised and supervised approaches. Correlation with digitized pathology images is conducted using classification images assigned by a modal class decision rule. The corresponding receiver operating characteristic curves are obtained based on the classification results. A total of 13 tumor samples obtained from 9 tumors are investigated. The results show good correlation of THz images with pathology results in all samples of cancer and fat tissues. For tumor samples of cancer, fat, and muscle tissues, THz images show reasonable correlation with pathology where the primary challenge lies in the overlapping dielectric properties of cancer and muscle tissues. The use of a supervised regression approach shows improvement in the classification images although not consistently in all tissue regions. Advancing THz imaging of breast tumors from mice and the development of accurate statistical models will ultimately progress the technique for the assessment of human breast tumor margins.
本文研究了太赫兹（THz）成像技术在新鲜切除的鼠异种移植乳腺癌肿瘤中的分类应用。这些肿瘤是通过将 E0771 乳腺癌腺癌细胞注射到高脂肪饮食饲养的老鼠侧腹而生长的。在切除后 1 小时内，使用脉冲太赫兹系统以反射模式对肿瘤和相邻组织进行成像。使用无监督和有监督的统计贝叶斯混合模型对太赫兹图像进行分类。使用模态类别决策规则分配的分类图像与数字化病理学图像进行相关性分析。基于分类结果获得相应的接收者操作特征曲线。总共研究了来自 9 个肿瘤的 13 个肿瘤样本。结果表明，在所有癌症和脂肪组织样本中，太赫兹图像与病理学结果具有良好的相关性。对于癌症、脂肪和肌肉组织的肿瘤样本，太赫兹图像与病理学结果具有合理的相关性，主要挑战在于癌症和肌肉组织的介电特性重叠。尽管在所有组织区域并非始终如此，但使用有监督回归方法可以改善分类图像。推进太赫兹成像技术对小鼠乳腺癌肿瘤的评估以及开发准确的统计模型将最终推动该技术用于评估人类乳腺癌肿瘤边界。
