Materials, Methods & Technologies, Volume 11, 2017

Abstract: The usage of H&E staining of morphological images for a pathological diagnosis has a long history. Even nowadays it is still used for cancer diagnosis by collecting biopsy samples from a surgical operation. Such images have only few quantitative parameters and sometimes this leads to ambiguous and subjective judgments. In fact, during the staining processes, some amount of the lipid and/or aqueous components and thereby the secondary conformation components of the protein are being lost as the cancer raw tissue is treated with methanol, xylene, heat, etc. It is possible, however, to use molecular vibrational spectroscopic imaging of raw tissue without such treatments in the operation room by utilizing Fourier-Transform Infrared (FT-IR) microscopy as a rapid screening method instead of the conventional H&E staining. We have developed a special sample holder for a FT-IR microscope, which keeps the biopsy sample and preserves its freshness allowing such instrument to be used as a rapid but more perfect screener of cancer grades. For this analysis, we have used a calibration curve and an algorithm based on the principal component regression (PCR) implemented in the software that has been used for many pathological cancer (adenocarcinoma) case studies.