Quantitative diagnosis of cervical neoplasia using fluorescence lifetime imaging on haematoxylin and eosin stained tissue sections

Abstract

The use of conventional fluorescence microscopy for characterizing tissue pathological states is limited by overlapping spectra and the dependence on excitation power and fluorophore concentration. Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) can overcome these limitations due to its insensitivity to fluorophore concentration, excitation power and spectral similarity. This study investigates the diagnosis of early cervical cancer using FLIM and a neural network extreme learning machine classifier. A concurrently high sensitivity and specificity of 92.8% and 80.2%, respectively, were achieved. The results suggest that the proposed technique can be used to supplement the traditional histopathological examination of early cervical cancer.

Fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM): Basic concepts and some recent developments

“…Alzheimer's disease, have been investigated with FLIM Berezovska et al, 2003;KaminskiSchierle et al, 2011) and even haematoxylin and eosin staining, a standard technique in histology, has been subjected to FLIM in a quest for more information than from the haematoxylin and eosin intensity images alone (Conklin et al, 2009;Gu et al, 2013).…”

Implementation of FLIM and SIFT for improved intraoperative delineation of glioblastoma margin

“…To date, there have been few reported cases where fluorescence lifetime has been used to examine H&E-stained sections for evaluation of the tissue microenvironment [23] , although studies have highlighted that healthy human tissue exhibited parallel, rather than distorted, populations of collagen (the main constituent in ECM) running disorderly to themselves [24] . Figures 3(A4), 3(B4), 3(C4), and 3(D4) show keypoint orientations of the same region of interest in Figs.…”

Investigation of fluorescence lifetime imaging for quantitative cervical cancer screening and diagnosis

“…Cellular changes including morphological and biochemical changes are involved in the process of cervical dysplasia or even malignancy [42]. Therefore, it is likely that early abnormalities occurring in top-half epithelium involve cellular changes that can contribute to lifetime change of eosin in the cytoplasm [114].…”

“…The FLIM measurement system used is the same as the one described in the previous chapter [114]. A time-resolved fluorescence measurement system incorporating a confocal laser-scanning microscope and a time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) system was used to image the H&E stained cervical tissue sections.…”

“…The H&E stained cervical cytological slides were imaged with the FLIM system described in the previous chapter [114]. The excitation power was adjusted to 20% of its maximum output.…”