Diffuse reflectance and fluorescence spectroscopy for breast conserving surgery

The major challenge in breast conserving surgery is the high rates of re-excision due to positive resection margins. This study evaluates whether a combined diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) and laser induced intrinsic fluorescence spectroscopy (IFS) technique can differentiate breast tissue sample types, towards the development of an intraoperative margin assessment tool.

Breast tissue samples were collected from patients undergoing breast cancer surgery. A handheld DRS-IFS probe was used on the frozen thawed ex-vivo  breast samples to acquire spectral data. Machine learning classifiers were used to determine sensitivity, specificity, overall diagnostic accuracy, and the area under the curve (AUC) against "gold-standard" histopathology ground truth.

181 breast tissue samples from 138 patients were interrogated using DRS-IFS. All patients were female, with median age (range) of 56.8 (20-94) years The total number of spectra acquired was 18,349. Following five-fold cross validation for normal versus cancer tissue, extreme gradient boost classifier achieved a sensitivity of 84% (SD ± 13), specificity of 61% (SD ± 16), overall diagnostic accuracy of 75% (SD ± 3), and AUC of 84%.

The results suggests that DRS-IFS can distinguish normal breast tissue from breast cancer with high diagnostic accuracy. For DRS-IFS to be translated into the operating theatre to aid a surgeon's real-time visualisation for oncologic margin control assessment of intraoperative, the in vivo diagnostic accuracy needs to be determined.