Differentiation of normal and cancerous lung tissues by multiphoton imaging

We utilize multiphoton microscopy for the label-free diagnosis of noncancerous, lung adenocarcinoma (LAC), and lung squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) tissues from humans. Our results show that the combination of second-harmonic generation (SHG) and multiphoton excited autofluorescence (MAF) signals may be used to acquire morphological and quantitative information in discriminating cancerous from noncancerous lung tissues. Specifically, noncancerous lung tissues are largely fibrotic in structure, while cancerous specimens are composed primarily of tumor masses. Quantitative ratiometric analysis using MAF to SHG index (MAFSI) shows that the average MAFSI for noncancerous and LAC lung tissue pairs are 0.55+/-0.23 and 0.87+/-0.15, respectively. In comparison, the MAFSIs for the noncancerous and SCC tissue pairs are 0.50+/-0.12 and 0.72+/-0.13, respectively. Our study shows that nonlinear optical microscopy can assist in differentiating and diagnosing pulmonary cancer from noncancerous tissues.