Characterization of Cancer and Normal Tissue Fluorescence through Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition

摘要

The statistical and characteristic features of the polarized fluorescence spectra from cancer, normal and benign human breast tissues are studied through wavelet transform and singular value decomposition. The discrete wavelets enabled one to isolate high and low frequency spectral fluctuations, which revealed substantial randomization in the cancerous tissues, not present in the normal cases. In particular, the fluctuations fitted well with a Gaussian distribution for the cancerous tissues in the perpendicular component. One finds non-Gaussian behavior for normal and benign tissues' spectral variations. The study of the difference of intensities in parallel and perpendicular channels, which is free from the diffusive component, revealed weak fluorescence activity in the 630nm domain, for the cancerous tissues. This may be ascribable to porphyrin emission. The role of both scatterers and fluorophores in the observed minor intensity peak for the cancer case is experimentally confirmed through tissue-phantom experiments. Continuous Morlet wavelet also highlighted this domain for the cancerous tissue fluorescence spectra. Correlation in the spectral fluctuation is further studied in different tissue types through singular value decomposition. Apart from identifying different domains of spectral activity for diseased and non-diseased tissues, we found random matrix support for the spectral fluctuations. The small eigenvalues of the perpendicular polarized fluorescence spectra of cancerous tissues fitted remarkably well with random matrix prediction for Gaussian random variables, confirming our observations about spectral fluctuations in the wavelet domain.