News item: A multimodal approach for cancer diagnostics

Jena (Germany) – Basal cell carcinoma is the most abundant malignant neoplasm in humans. The disease can show a variety of different morphologies, which are based on different cellular biology. Furthermore, the carcinoma often grows invisibly to the eye imbedded in the surrounding skin. Therefore, in some cases its clinical detection is challenging. Jürgen Popp and his colleagues from the Institute of Photonic Technology in Jena (Germany) and the Lund University Hospital (Sweden) want to establish an unsupervised tissue classification method based on multimodal imaging. Chemometrics shall be applied to discriminate basal cell carcinoma from non-diseased tissue. Now, they present a case study applying a combination of various linear and non-linear imaging modalities, i.e. fluorescence, Raman and second-harmonic generation microscopy, to study the morphochemistry of basal cell carcinoma in ex-vivo sections.
The new approach yields detailed insight into the morphochemistry of the samples. While structural features, i.e. the presence of collagen structures, can be selectively recorded by SHG microscopy, single and twophoton fluorescence reveal the spatial distribution of native fluorophores in the sample. Finally, the joint application of Raman and CARS microspectroscopy allows for complementary characterization of the chemical composition of the sample.
The researchers observed an appealing appearance of large storage cells or reservoirs of lipids in the aggressive basal cell carcinoma samples. Further research with statistics will be needed to prove if this is a significant sign and if so a compensation for low nutrition from the diffusing vessels in fast growing malignancies. The comparison with the different techniques shows a complementarity in the understanding of the biology in the tissue investigated. (DOI: 10.1002/jbio.201000071)