Quantification of photonic localization properties of targeted nuclear mass density variations: Application in cancer‐stage detection

Abstract

Light localization is a phenomenon which arises due to the interference effects of light waves inside a disordered optical medium. Quantification of degree light localization in optical media is widely used for characterizing degree of structural disorder in that media. Recently, this light localization approach was extended to analyze structural changes in biological cell like heterogeneous optical media, with potential application in cancer diagnostics. Confocal fluorescence microscopy was used to construct "optical lattices," which represents 2-dimensional refractive index map corresponding to the spatial mass density distribution of a selected molecule inside the cell. The structural disorder properties of the selected molecules were evaluated numerically using light localization strength in these optical lattices, in a single parameter called "disorder strength." The method showed a promising potential in differentiating cancerous and non-cancerous cells. In this paper, we show that by quantifying submicron scale disorder strength in the nuclear DNA mass density distribution, a wide range of control and cancerous breast and prostate cells at different hierarchy levels of tumorigenicity were correctly distinguished. We also discuss how this photonic technique can be used in examining tumorigenicity level in unknown prostate cancer cells, and potential to generalize the method to other cancer cells.

Optical study of chemotherapy efficiency in cancer treatment via intracellular structural disorder analysis using partial wave spectroscopy

“…The altered ionic balance and variation in cell volume , contribute to the variation of characteristic attributes which affects the matrix stiffness and cell texture in chemoresistant cells in comparison to the control cells . All these changes within chemoresistant cells enhances the randomness/disorderness, resulting in disabling of the cellular integrity . Furthermore, the alteration in cell volume can also affect excitability, contraction, cell proliferation, migration, receptor cycling and apoptosis.…”

Photonic technique to study the effects of probiotics on chronic alcoholic brain cells by quantifying their molecular specific structural alterations via confocal imaging

“…Here, we hypothesize that probing the molecular specific structural changes can measure the physical state of cells/tissues and organs in the chronic alcoholic brain. The concept of characterizing the molecular specific structural alterations was recently introduced to quantify the nano to microscale changes in cells in abnormalities and has shown success in several studies [1, 2, 9, 10]. The initial case studies ranging from cancer to abnormalities in brain cells due to chronic alcoholism have shown promising results in the characterization of the physical state of the cell [9–12].…”

“…Therefore, we are using the recently developed mesoscopic physics‐based molecular specific light localization method, inverse participation ratio (IPR) technique, which can quantify the molecular specific mass density fluctuations in cells/tissue as the degree of structural disorder due to cancer, drug effect or brain abnormalities [1, 2, 10, 12]. This technique has been used successfully to quantify the extent of aggressive cancer in biological cells, especially to detect the progress of carcinogenesis in drug treatment [9, 10, 28]. Here, we want to extend this method to probe the molecular specific spatial structural changes in brain cells and organelles to study the effect of the probiotic in chronic alcoholism.…”

Astaxanthin as a new Raman probe for biosensing of specific subcellular lipidic structures: can we detect lipids in cells under resonance conditions?

“…Raman imaging enables for label-free visualization of organelles and cellular compartments, e.g. LDs, ER, nuclei, and for monitoring of the distribution of various substances at the subcellular level [3,4,[13][14][15]. However, some experiments require special conditions of measurements, for example fragile tissues need to be examined under the low laser power to reduce the changes of local overheating and damage of the sample or when live cells are studied instead of fixed ones.…”