Recently, researchers from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea investigated using ultrahigh resolution full-field optical coherence microscopy (FF-OCM) for identifying live cancer cells.
In the experiment, the researchers used FF-OCM to quantify the integral refractive index (RI) distribution of a single unmodified cell without any extra cell treatment, so that the full-field RI contrast image served as an effective biophysical indicator to diagnose cell malignancy. In measurement of the RI map, the physical thickness distribution of an adherent cell in culture was processed from 0.6 µm resolved en-face (XY) cell tomograms. Subsequently, from the en-face image of the bottom surface of the cell or the top surface of the dish, the phase-gain image of the same cell was acquired. Then, axially averaged RI map was simply extracted with decoupling the cell thicknesses from the phase shifts. The phase sensitivity of the system was validated to be around 124 mrad. With the system, RI maps of several living cell lines of normal and cancer cells were experimentally achieved at RI accuracy of 0.001 and quantized graphically. The measurements showed that the cancer cells had larger RI than normal ones.
The researchers expect that this approach using FF-OCM has great potential for early cancer diagnosis and dynamic cell analysis as an in situ, label-free biophysical assay.
Source: OCT News
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Posted by Lee Mather
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