Discrimination between Breast Cancer Cells and White Blood Cells by Non-Invasive Measurements: Implications for a Novel In Vitro-Based Circulating Tumor Cell Model Using Digital Holographic Cytometry

Abstract

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer worldwide. Metastasis is the main reason for death in breast cancer, and today, there is a lack of methods to detect and isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs), mainly due to their heterogeneity and rarity. There are some systems that are designed to detect rare epithelial cancer cells in whole blood based on the most common marker used today, the epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM). It has been shown that aggressive breast cancer metastases are of non-epithelial origin and are therefore not always detected using EpCAM as a marker. In the present study, we used an in vitro-based circulating tumor cell model comprising a collection of six breast cancer cell lines and white blood cell lines. We used digital holographic cytometry (DHC) to characterize and distinguish between the different cell types by area, volume and thickness. Here, we present significant differences in cell size-related parameters observed when comparing white blood cells and breast cancer cells by using DHC. In conclusion, DHC can be a powerful diagnostic tool for the characterization of CTCs in the blood.

Circulating Tumor Cell Models Mimicking Metastasizing Cells In Vitro: Discrimination of Colorectal Cancer Cells and White Blood Cells Using Digital Holographic Cytometry

“…Moreover, we recently used DHC to discriminate between breast cancer cells and leukemic cells according to their morphological parameters. Leukemic cells were significantly smaller in the investigated parameters optical thickness, volume, and area compared to epithelial breast cancer cells [25]. This finding paved the way for using DHC as a tool for the in vitro circulating tumor cell-model, now further explored in this study by combining morphology measurements with epithelial and mesenchymal surface markers.…”

“…We have previously analyzed a collection of breast cancer cell lines using an "in vitro circulating tumor cell model" for analysis of sialic acid as a tumor marker [44] and further determined size parameters using DHC, showing discrimination between large epithelial breast cancer cells and smaller WBC [25].…”

“…We have previously analyzed a collection of breast cancer cell lines in an "in vitro circulating tumor cell model" for analysis of sialic acid as a tumor marker and size parameters using DHC, thus distinguishing larger epithelial breast cancer cells from small blood cells. The breast cancer cell lines were significantly larger compared to white blood cell lines, Jurkat and THP-1 cells [25,44].…”

Enhancing digital hologram reconstruction using reverse-attention loss for untrained physics-driven deep learning models with uncertain distance

“…Digital Holography (DH) is an emerging microscopic imaging technique with applications in Internet of Thing (IoT) security, [1][2][3][4] measurement tasks in production, 5 non-invasive various diagnoses, 6,7 etc. The basic idea of DH is to use an imaging sensor to capture a hologram of real micro-scale samples.…”

Investigating Morphological Changes of T-lymphocytes after Exposure with Bacterial Determinants for Early Detection of Septic Conditions

“…To study cells or tissues in the context of various diseases, quantitative phase imaging [15] with digital holographic microscopy (DHM) [16] is a relatively new approach and provides a promising tool for clinical diagnostics [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. This technique is a variant of quantitative phase microscopy [16,24,25] where the interference pattern of an object illumination wave and an undisturbed reference wave is recorded for numerical reconstruction of phase contrast images.…”