Enhancement of Early Cervical Cancer Diagnosis with Epithelial Layer Analysis of Fluorescence Lifetime Images

Abstract

This work reports the use of layer analysis to aid the fluorescence lifetime diagnosis of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) from H&E stained cervical tissue sections. The mean and standard deviation of lifetimes in single region of interest (ROI) of cervical epithelium were previously shown to correlate to the gold standard histopathological classification of early cervical cancer. These previously defined single ROIs were evenly divided into layers for analysis. A 10-layer model revealed a steady increase in fluorescence lifetime from the inner to the outer epithelial layers of healthy tissue sections, suggesting a close association with cellular maturity. The shorter lifetime and minimal lifetime increase towards the epithelial surface of CIN-affected regions are in good agreement with the absence of cellular maturation in CIN. Mean layer lifetimes in the top-half cervical epithelium were used as feature vectors for extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier discriminations. It was found that the proposed layer analysis technique greatly improves the sensitivity and specificity to 94.6% and 84.3%, respectively, which can better supplement the traditional gold standard cervical histopathological examinations.

A Machine Learning Tool to Predict the Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Patients with Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer

“…Conversely in the area of cervical cancer research, ML can be used for supporting the study of human papillomavirus-related disease, evaluating either cervical cytology, colposcopy and genomic analysis [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. However, there are only a few studies that have examined oncologic outcome [52].…”

Feasibility of clinical detection of cervical dysplasia using angle-resolved low coherence interferometry measurements of depth-resolved nuclear morphology

“…12 Examples of optical techniques used to detect cervical dysplasia include autofluorescence microscopy, [13][14][15] fluorescence and reflectance spectroscopy, [16][17][18][19][20] Raman spectroscopy, [21][22][23] optical coherence tomography (OCT), 24,25 and confocal microscopy. [26][27][28] Some more recent advances include atomic force microscopy imaging of liquid based cytology, 29 development of point-of-care tampon-based digital colposcope, 30 photoacoustic imaging for detection of cervical lesions, 31 fluorescence lifetime imaging of H&E tissue sections, 32 and a structured illumination fiber-optic microendoscope for studying nuclear morphology in cervical columnar epithelium. 33 In this paper, we present a clinical study aimed at establishing the feasibility of using angle-resolved low coherence interferometry (a/LCI) as an optical biopsy technique for the early detection of cervical dysplasia.…”

“…Examples of optical techniques used to detect cervical dysplasia include autofluorescence microscopy, fluorescence and reflectance spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), and confocal microscopy . Some more recent advances include atomic force microscopy imaging of liquid based cytology, development of point‐of‐care tampon‐based digital colposcope, photoacoustic imaging for detection of cervical lesions, fluorescence lifetime imaging of H&E tissue sections, and a structured illumination fiber‐optic microendoscope for studying nuclear morphology in cervical columnar epithelium …”

Comparative Analysis of Eosin-based Fluorescence Microscopy of Non-neoplastic Breast Tissue and Fibroadenoma

“…Investigations have confirmed the utility of eosin-based fluorescence technique and have reported that fluorescence is a powerful tool to calculate changes in normal tissue and a diseased condition [15][16][17]. Gu et al has stated that this technique has the ability to characterize the tissue, provide visual augmentation and differentiation of structures to aid standard light microscopy in the diagnosis of the disease [18]. However, to the best of our knowledge no data has been reported to have assessed the application of eosin-based fluorescence microscopy on breast tissue.…”