Surgery is the usual treatment for removing malformations and tumours in brain; however, the lack of contrast betweendiseased tissues and normal brain is a major problem. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can be used to detect them,but brain shifts may severely reduce the accuracy of surgical removal procedures. In this framework, opticalspectroscopy – being a fast and label-free method for analysing tissue composition – has the potential for improvingdetection and diagnosis of diseased areas. In this study, we used a quadrifurcated optical fibre-probe system combiningmultiple spectroscopic techniques for analysing ex vivo human brain freshly excised biopsies taken from both tumourand dysplastic tissues. All spectral recordings were done immediately after surgical resection, requiring less than 2minutes for each sample. The recorded data were analysed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and LinearDiscriminant Analysis (LDA) for obtaining an automated classification of the examined samples based on the intrinsicspectral information provided by all three techniques. Significant differences were observed between dysplastic andtumour spectra, resulting in high sensitivity (83%) and specificity (73%). In particular, diffuse reflectance and UVexcitedfluorescence spectroscopies provided the highest accuracies in discriminating different tissue types (78% and75%, respectively) in good agreement with the corresponding histopathological examination; moreover, theircombination with Raman spectroscopy resulted in a further improve of the classification capability up to 85%. Thepresented method demonstrates the huge potential of multimodal spectroscopy for the examination of brain tissues andopens the way for possible applications in surgical environment.
展开▼
