Quantitative depth estimation of tumor invasion in early gastric cancer by scattering of circularly polarized light is computationally investigated using the Monte Carlo method. Using the optical parameters of the human stomach wall and its carcinoma, the intensity and circular polarization of light scattered from pseudo-healthy and cancerous tissues were calculated over a wide spectral range. Large differences in the circular polarization with opposite signs, together with the large intensity, are obtained at wavelengths 600 nm and 950 nm. At these two wavelengths, the sampling depth of the biological tissues can be modulated by tuning the detection angle. In bi-layered pseudo-tissues with a cancerous layer on a healthy layer and vice versa, the degree of circular polarization of scattered light shows systematic changes depending on the thickness and depth of the cancerous layer, which indicates the feasibility of in vivo quantitative estimation of cancer progression in early gastric cancer.
Keywords: cancer detection; circularly polarized light; early-stage stomach cancer; multiple scattering; optical biopsy.
© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Biophotonics published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.