Hybrid Microscope Could Bring Digital Biopsy to the Clinic

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

By adding infrared capability to the ubiquitous, standard optical microscope, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hope to bring cancer diagnosis into the digital era.

Pairing infrared measurements with high-resolution optical images and machine learning algorithms, the researchers created digital biopsies that closely correlated with traditional pathology techniques and also outperformed state-of-the-art infrared microscopes.

Led by Rohit Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering and the director of the Cancer Center at Illinois, the group published its results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The advantage is that no stains are required, and both the organization of cells and their chemistry can be measured. Measuring the chemistry of tumor cells and their microenvironment can lead to better cancer diagnoses and better understanding of the disease," Bhargava said.

[...] Bhargava's group developed its hybrid microscope by adding an infrared laser and a specialized microscope lens, called an interference objective, to an optical camera. The infrared-optical hybrid measures both infrared data and a high-resolution optical image with a light microscope -- the kind ubiquitous in clinics and labs.

"We built the hybrid microscope from off-the-shelf components. This is important because it allows others to easily build their own microscope or upgrade an existing microscope," said Martin Schnell, a postdoctoral fellow in Bhargava's group and first author of the paper.

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