Unmet clinical need. Surgeons currently rely mostly upon visual inspection and palpation to determine where the edges of a tumor are during resection procedures. This is inaccurate and leads to inferior surgical outcomes (poor extent of resection), which correlates with poor patient outcomes. While intraoperative frozen-section analysis (FSA) of excised tissues is possible, the amount of tissue that can be interrogated by FSA is limited, the image quality of FSA is not ideal, it can be slow (~30 min or more), and tissue orientation is often lost (the tissue must be transported out of the operating room). We have been developing a number of point-of-care optical-imaging approaches to allow surgeons to rapidly visualize the tumor margin of freshly excised surgical specimens to enable more-complete resections.
UW press release describing the use of light-sheet microscopy for surgical guidance and other applications:
Light-sheet surface microscopy of fresh human breast tissue. Light-sheet microscopy imaging dataset from a fresh head & neck cancer specimen, showing the process of surface extraction, H&E false coloring, and display.
Selected publications.
G. Gao, D. Miyasato, L.A. Barner, R. Serafin, K.W. Bishop, W. Xie, A.K. Glaser, L.D. True, and J.T.C. Liu, “Comprehensive surface histology of fresh resection margins with rapid open-top light-sheet (OTLS) microscopy,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 70, 2160 (2023) [PDF]
Y. Chen, W. Xie, A.K. Glaser, N.P. Reder, C. Mao, S.M. Dintzis, J.C. Vaughan, and J.T.C. Liu, "Rapid pathology of lumpectomy margins with open-top light-sheet (OTLS) microscopy," Biomed. Opt. Exp. 10, 1257 (2019) [PDF]
W. Xie, Y. Chen, Y. Wang, L. Wei, C. Yin, A.K. Glaser, M.E. Fauver, E.J. Seibel, S.M. Dintzis, J.C. Vaughan, N.P. Reder and J.T.C. Liu, "Microscopy with ultraviolet surface excitation for wide-area pathology of breast surgical margins," J. Biomed. Opt. 24, 026501 (2019) [PDF]
Y. Wang*, N.P. Reder*, S. Kang, A.K. Glaser, Q. Yang, M.A. Wall, S.H. Javid, S.M. Dintzis, and J.T.C. Liu, "Raman-encoded molecular imaging (REMI) with topically applied SERS nanoparticles for intraoperative guidance of lumpectomy," Cancer Research 77, 4506 (2017) [PDF | Supplement] *equal contribution
A.K. Glaser*, N.P. Reder*, Y. Chen, E.F. McCarty, C. Yin, L. Wei, Y. Wang, L.D. True, and J.T.C. Liu, "Light-sheet microscopy for slide-free nondestructive pathology of large clinical specimens," Nature Biomedical Engineering 1, 0084 (2017) *equal contribution
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