부산대학교 도서관

Lay description In this paper we demonstrate for the first time the imaging of breast tissue biopsies using the nonlinear imaging technique third-harmonic generation (THG) microscopy. The gold standard for imaging breast tissue is to stain the tissue with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) in order to enhance the contrast in an otherwise optically transparent material. However staining is time-consuming and can create unwanted artifacts. Therefore, the THG imaging approach that we utilize in this study does away with the need for any external contrast agents. In our work, we show that THG microscopy provides a comparable contrast with the conventional label-free polarized light microscopy and is devoid of the imaging artifacts prevalent in phase contrast microscopy, another label-free approach. Also, a simple feature detection algorithm is applied to detect tumor associated lymphocytes, which is a type of a white blood cell, on the obtained THG images. The lymphocyte rich regions detected by our algorithm are then compared with regions identified by a pathologist from an H&E stained breast tissue. Our results suggest that THG imaging holds potential as a complementary imaging technique for studying breast tissue biopsies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]