Cervical cancer prognosis and diagnosis using electrical impedance spectroscopy

Abstract

Electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) has been used as an adjunct to colposcopy for cervical cancer diagnosis for many years, Currently, the template match method is employed for EIS measurements analysis, where the measured EIS spectra are compared with the templates generated from three-dimensional finite element (FE) models of cancerous and non-cancerous cervical tissue, and the matches between the measured EIS spectra and the templates are then used to derive a score that indicates the association strength of the measured EIS to the High-Grade Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia (HG CIN). These FE models can be viewed as the computational versions of the associated physical tissue models. In this paper, the problem is revisited with an objective to develop a new method for EIS data analysis that might reveal the relationship between the change in the tissue structure due to disease and the change in the measured spectrum. This could provide us with important information to understand the histopathological mechanism that underpins the EIS-based HG CIN diagnostic decision making and the prognostic value of EIS for cervical cancer diagnosis. A further objective is to develop an alternative EIS data processing method for HG CIN detection that does not rely on physical models of tissues so as to facilitate extending the EIS technique to new medical diagnostic applications where the template spectra are not available. An EIS data-driven method was developed in this paper to achieve the above objectives, where the EIS data analysis for cervical cancer diagnosis and prognosis were formulated as the classification problems and a Cole model-based spectrum curve fitting approach was proposed to extract features from EIS readings for classification. Machine learning techniques were then used to build classification models with the selected features for cervical cancer diagnosis and evaluation of the prognostic value of the measured EIS. The interpretable classification models were developed with real EIS data sets, which enable us to associate the changes in the observed EIS and the risk of being HG CIN or developing HG CIN with the changes in tissue structure due to disease. The developed classification models were used for HG CIN detection and evaluation of the prognostic value of EIS and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed method. The method developed is of long-term benefit for EIS–based cervical cancer diagnosis and, in conjunction with standard colposcopy, there is the potential for the developed method to provide a more effective and efficient patient management strategy for clinic practice.

The Use of Virtual Tissue Constructs That Include Morphological Variability to Assess the Potential of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy to Differentiate between Thyroid and Parathyroid Tissues during Surgery

“…In addition, future studies could explore thyroid and parathyroid separability based on a different set of spectra parameters, e.g., using another subset from the 14 computed/measured impedance values, the imaginary part of impedance, the phase difference or the Cole parameters, which are frequently used in studies investigating electrical properties of tissues to represent the impedance spectra features. For example, various combinations of Cole parameters have been investigated and successfully used as the features to distinguish cervical intraepithelial neoplasia from healthy tissues using machine learning classifiers [38]. The Cole model fitting methods were not applied in this study, due to the limitations of the shape of parathyroid spectra and the frequency range in the experimental dataset, as discussed in [23].…”

Cervical Cancer Detection Techniques: A Chronological Review

“…The matching between spectra is expressed as a score to determine the high strength between the finite element model and the concourse and non-cancerous cells. This method can be effective for cervical cancer detection [106]. Some studies focused on the concomitant presence of miRNA-9-5p in cervical cancer, which was detected by RT-PCR.…”

EIT probe based intraoperative tissue inspection for minimally invasive surgery

“…In the past decades, the unique electrical properties of different tissues have been leveraged in a variety of biomedical applications [10][11][12]. The electrical property spectrum analysis has been successfully employed in distinguishing various tissue types, given their distinct cellular structures and compositions, as evidenced by the works of [13,14] for tissue identification, [15,16] for cancer detection, and [17,18] for health monitoring. In addition, further research has aimed at capturing the spatial distribution of these electrical properties within a specified region.…”