Terahertz refractive index-based morphological dilation for breast carcinoma delineation

 Cassar, Quentin, Samuel Caravera, Gaëtan MacGrogan, Thomas Bücher, Philipp Hillger, Ullrich Pfeiffer, Thomas Zimmer, Jean-Paul Guillet, and Patrick Mounaix. "Terahertz refractive index-based morphological dilation for breast carcinoma delineation." Scientific reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 1-16.

Abstract

This paper reports investigations led on the combination of the refractive index and morphological dilation to enhance performances towards breast tumour margin delineation during conserving surgeries. The refractive index map of invasive ductal and lobular carcinomas were constructed from an inverse electromagnetic problem. Morphological dilation combined with refractive index thresholding was conducted to classify the tissue regions as malignant or benign. A histology routine was conducted to evaluate the performances of various dilation geometries associated with different thresholds. It was found that the combination of a wide structuring element and high refractive index was improving the correctness of tissue classification in comparison to other configurations or without dilation. The method reports a sensitivity of around 80% and a specificity of 82% for the best case. These results indicate that combining the fundamental optical properties of tissues denoted by their refractive index with morphological dilation may open routes to define supporting procedures during breast-conserving surgeries.

for full paper see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85853-8

.....Time-domain terahertz pulsed images were acquired with a TPS3000 spectrometer (TeraView Ltd, Cambridge, UK) operating in reflection geometry. In such systems, terahertz pulses are generated from the activation of a GaAs photoswitch.....