Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Friday, November 30, 2007
Optical Imaging for Medicine and Biology: Applications in Cancer Detection
8:00AM-4:00PM, Cocktail Hour 4:00-5:00PM
The Photonics Center
8 Saint Mary's Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02215

Host:
Professor Jerome Mertz, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Boston University
College of Engineering
44 Cummington Street
Boston, MA 02215

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Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Speaker: Max Deim

Title: Spectral Diagnosis of Tissue Sections and Cells by Vibrational Micro-Spectroscopy

Max Diem
Laboratory for Spectral Diagnosis
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
m.diem@neu.edu

Vibrational (IR & Raman) microspectroscopy and microspectral imaging monitor the biochemical composition of tissue sections, cells and even subcellular parts of cells. The Laboratory for Spectral Diagnosis (LSpD) at Northeastern University uses these modern spectral methods, coupled to multivariate methods of data analysis, for three different research areas, each aimed at establishing new techniques for the diagnosis of excised tissue (biopsies), exfoliated cells and for visualizing intra-cellular processes.

• Spectral Pathology (tissue diagnostics): Infrared microspectral data sets, containing up to 100,000 individual spectra from pixel (6.25 or 25 mm on edge) are analyzed by hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and artificial neural nets (ANN), resulting in diagnostic images, showing tumour infiltration in surrounding tissue. Oral, colon, breast  and thyroid cancers, as well as metastases of these cancers into adjacent lymph nodes, have been studied, and diagnostic algorithms have been constructed. Results from Spectral Pathology will be presented.
• Spectral Cytology (cell diagnostics): Infrared spectra from thousands of individual exfoliated cervical, buccal and urine-borne cells are collected automatically and analyzed by multivariate methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and ANNs in an effort to develop screening methods for cervical, oral and bladder cancer.

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