HyperProbe consortium: innovate tumour neurosurgery with innovative photonic solutions

Abstract

Recent advancements in imaging technologies (MRI, PET, CT, among others) have significantly improved clinical localisation of lesions of the central nervous system (CNS) before surgery, making possible for neurosurgeons to plan and navigate away from functional brain locations when removing tumours, such as gliomas. However, neuronavigation in the surgical management of brain tumours remains a significant challenge, due to the inability to maintain accurate spatial information of pathological and healthy locations intraoperatively. To answer this challenge, the HyperProbe consortium have been put together, consisting of a team of engineers, physicists, data scientists and neurosurgeons, to develop an innovative, all-optical, intraoperative imaging system based on (i) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for rapid, multiwavelength spectral acquisition, and (ii) artificial intelligence (AI) for image reconstruction, morpho-chemical characterisation and molecular fingerprint recognition. Our HyperProbe system will (1) map, monitor and quantify biomolecules of interest in cerebral physiology; (2) be handheld, cost-effective and user-friendly; (3) apply AI-based methods for the reconstruction of the hyperspectral images, the analysis of the spatio-spectral data and the development and quantification of novel biomarkers for identification of glioma and differentiation from functional brain tissue. HyperProbe will be validated and optimised with studies in optical phantoms, in vivo against gold standard modalities in neuronavigational imaging, and finally we will provide proof of principle of its performances during routine brain tumour surgery on patients. HyperProbe aims at providing functional and structural information on biomarkers of interest that is currently missing during neuro-oncological interventions.

5-ALA induced PpIX fluorescence spectroscopy in neurosurgery: a review

“…This same group used has also used this LCTF-based HSI system for PpIX detection in pediatric tumors (Schwake et al, 2019), and has demonstrated more sensitive detection of autofluorescence and PpIX spectral features such as the 620 and 634 nm states in ex vivo samples from 128 patients with HGG and LGG (Black et al, 2021), and implemented new phantom recommendations for HSI in 5-ALA-PpIX FGS (Walke et al, 2023). Another use of HSI that is being explored by an ongoing European collaborative is centered on a system that may ultimately be capable of mapping, monitoring and quantifying biomolecules of interest; it has been engineered to be handheld and user-friendly, and apply artificial intelligence-based methods for the reconstruction of spectrally-resolved images (Giannoni et al, 2023). Such efforts are positioning HSI technologies in a way that may potentially improve diagnostic performance across the full surgical field of view in 5-ALA-PpIX FGS.…”