The use of optical techniques to guide cancer diagnosis and radical surgical resections

Abstract

In this thesis we studied the feasibility of three optical imaging techniques to differentiate tumor tissue from its surrounding tissue for various clinical purposes. Our main research question hereby was:

Is it feasible to differentiate tumor tissue from surrounding tissue using optical imaging techniques; and which technique can be of added value for clinicians in which clinical situation?

We concluded that both full field optical coherence tomography and single fiber reflectance spectroscopy could either with help of pathologists or by signal analysis differentiate tumor tissue from its surrounding tissue. Although FF-OCT is especially useful in imaging ovarian tissue, endogenous contrast in breast and pancreatic tissue is not yet sufficient. Using fluorescence lifetime we were able to demonstrate differences between tracer bound to tumor cells and tracer not bound to tumor cells. However, this technique is still much more experimental and with the current technique, differentiating tumor tissue from its directly surrounding tissue is not yet possible.