Changes of collagen ultrastructure in breast cancer tissue determined by second-harmonic generation double Stokes-Mueller polarimetric microscopy

Ahmad Golaraei; Lukas Kontenis; Richard Cisek; Danielle Tokarz; Susan J Done; Brian C Wilson; Virginijus Barzda

doi:10.1364/BOE.7.004054

Changes of collagen ultrastructure in breast cancer tissue determined by second-harmonic generation double Stokes-Mueller polarimetric microscopy

Biomed Opt Express. 2016 Sep 15;7(10):4054-4068. doi: 10.1364/BOE.7.004054. eCollection 2016 Oct 1.

Authors

Ahmad Golaraei¹, Lukas Kontenis¹, Richard Cisek¹, Danielle Tokarz², Susan J Done², Brian C Wilson², Virginijus Barzda¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and Institute for Optical Sciences, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1A7, Canada; Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada.
² Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, 610 University Avenue, Toronto, ON M5G 2M9, Canada.

Abstract

Second-harmonic generation (SHG) double Stokes-Mueller polarimetric microscopy is applied to study the alteration of collagen ultrastructure in a tissue microarray containing three pathological human breast cancer types with differently overexpressed estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PgR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Kleinman symmetry is experimentally validated in breast tissue for 1028 nm laser wavelength and it has been shown that measurements with only linearly polarized incoming and outgoing states can determine molecular nonlinear susceptibility tensor component ratio, average in-plane orientation of collagen fibers and degree of linear polarization of SHG. Increase in the susceptibility ratio for ER, PgR, HER2 positive cases, reveals ultrastructural changes in the collagen fibers while the susceptibility ratio increase and decrease in degree of linear polarization for ER and PgR positive cases indicate alteration of the ultrastructure and increased disorder of the collagen fibers within each focal volume. The study demonstrates a potential use of polarimetric SHG microscopy for collagen characterization and cancer diagnostics.

Keywords: (110.5405) Polarimetric imaging; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging; (180.4315) Nonlinear microscopy; (190.4160) Multiharmonic generation.