Multispectral Photoacoustic Imaging of Breast Cancer Tissue

Intraoperative multispectral photoacoustic pathology assessment presents a promising approach to guide biopsy resection. In this study, we developed and validated a novel photoacoustic technique to differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissues, with the ultimate goal of intraoperative deployment. The test healthy tissue region had 0.967 mean correlation with the representative healthy tissue spectrum and lower correlation (0.801) with the cancer tissue spectrum. The test cancer tissue region had 0.954 mean correlation with the cancer tissue spectrum and lower correlation (0.762) with the healthy tissue spectrum. Our method was further validated through qualitative comparison with high-resolution hematoxylin and eosin histopathology scans. This label-free histopathology approach utilizing multispectral photoacoustic imaging has the potential to enable real-time tumor margin determination during biopsy.