Primary study of identification of parathyroid gland based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Qianqian Wang; Wenting Xiangli; Xiaohong Chen; Jinghong Zhang; Geer Teng; Xutai Cui; Bushra Sana Idrees; Kai Wei

doi:10.1364/BOE.417738

Primary study of identification of parathyroid gland based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Biomed Opt Express. 2021 Mar 10;12(4):1999-2014. doi: 10.1364/BOE.417738. eCollection 2021 Apr 1.

Authors

Qianqian Wang^{1

2}, Wenting Xiangli^{1

2}, Xiaohong Chen³, Jinghong Zhang⁴, Geer Teng^{1

2}, Xutai Cui^{1

2}, Bushra Sana Idrees^{1

2}, Kai Wei^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, 100081 Beijing, China.
² Key Laboratory of Photonic Information Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, 100081 Beijing, China.
³ Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.
⁴ Department of General Surgery, Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.

Abstract

The identification and preservation of parathyroid glands (PGs) is a major issue in thyroidectomy. The PG is particularly difficult to distinguish from the surrounding tissues. Accidental damage or removal of the PG may result in temporary or permanent postoperative hypoparathyroidism and hypocalcemia. In this study, a novel method for identification of the PG was proposed based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for the first time. LIBS spectra were collected from the smear samples of PG and non-parathyroid gland (NPG) tissues (thyroid and neck lymph node) of rabbits. The emission lines (related to K, Na, Ca, N, O, CN, C₂, etc.) observed in LIBS spectra were ranked and selected based on the important weight calculated by random forest (RF). Three machine learning algorithms were used as classifiers to distinguish PGs from NPGs. The artificial neural network classifier provided the best classification performance. The results demonstrated that LIBS can be adopted to discriminate between smear samples of PG and NPG, and it has a potential in intra-operative identification of PGs.