Thermo-optic measurements and their inter-dependencies for delineating cancerous breast biopsy tissue from adjacent normal.

The histopathological diagnosis of cancer is the current gold standard to differentiate normal from cancerous tissues. We propose a portable platform prototype to characterize the tissue's thermal and optical properties, and their inter-dependencies to potentially aid the pathologist in making an informed decision. The measurements were performed on 10 samples from five subjects, where the cancerous and adjacent normal were extracted from the same patient. It was observed that thermal conductivity (k) and reduced-scattering-coefficient (μ' ) for both the cancerous and normal tissues reduced with the rise in tissue temperature. Comparing cancerous and adjacent normal tissue, the difference in k and μ' (at 940 nm) were statistically significant (p = 7.94e-3), while combining k and μ' achieved the highest statistical significance (6.74e-4). These preliminary results promise and support testing on a large number of samples for rapidly differentiating cancerous from adjacent normal tissues.