A team of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers led by Professor Stephen Boppart has successfully visualized the tumor microenvironment of human breast tissue shortly after it was surgically removed from a patient in the operating room. The researchers achieved this using a new portable optical imaging system developed in Boppart's lab.

This work, which was reported in a paper published online December 19 in Science Advances, marks a major step toward providing cancer researchers with a new tool for tracking tumor progression and physicians new technology for tissue pathology and diagnostics.

Typically, the process for diagnosing cancer takes several days. A surgeon first removes a tissue sample that is then processed with chemical dyes; later, the sample is sent to a pathologist for examination and subsequent diagnosis.
"We believe that capturing the dynamic cellular and molecular features in freshly removed or biopsied tissue specimens contains valuable diagnostic and prognostic information that is currently lost when specimens are placed in a fixative and essentially killed quickly in order to preserve structure," said Boppart, who is also a faculty member at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois and a professor of electrical & computer engineering (ECE) and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. "Our imaging platform and methodology allow us to extract this new information in real-time, at the point-of-procedure."

Boppart's portable optical imaging system uses precise light pulses to simultaneously image tissue in four modalities, enabling his team to study concurrent processes within cells and tissue that make up the tumor microenvironment. For example, collagen fibers appear in green; elastin fibers and flavin adenine dinucleotide-containing cell cytoplasm appear in yellow; cell membranes, lipid boundaries, and extracellular vesicles (EVs) appear in magenta; and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide in the cells and lipids appears in cyan.

The team demonstrated the viability of their imaging system in the operating room at Carle Foundation Hospital during breast cancer surgeries. Within 30 minutes of the diseased tissue being extracted, the researchers were able to identify specific tissue features, including molecular signatures associated with metabolic activity inside individual cells that make up the tumor microenivronment.

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