Probing pancreatic disease using tissue optical spectroscopy

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma, one of the leading causes of cancer death in the United States, has a five-year survival rate of only 4%. Present detection methods do not provide accurate diagnosis in the disease's early stages. To investigate whether optical spectroscopy could potentially aid in early diagnosis and improve survival rates, reflectance and fluorescence spectroscopies were employed for the first time in a limited pilot study to probe freshly excised human pancreatic tissues (normal, pancreatitis, and adenocarcinoma) and in vivo human pancreatic cancer xenografts in nude mice. In human pancreatic tissues, measurements were associated with endogenous fluorophores NAD(P)H and collagen, as well as tissue optical properties, with larger relative collagen content detected in adenocarcinoma and pancreatitis than normal. Good correspondence was observed between spectra from adenocarcinoma and cancer xenograft tissues. Reflectance data indicated that adenocarcinoma had higher reflectance in the 430- to 500-nm range compared to normal and pancreatitis tissues. The observed significant differences between the fluorescence and reflectance properties of normal, pancreatitis, and adenocarcinoma tissues present an opportunity for future statistical validation on a larger patient pool and indicate a potential application of multimodal optical spectroscopy to differentiate between diseased and normal pancreatic tissue states.