Effect of tissue preparation and storage on elemental expression in oral tissues using

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a recently emerging novel spectroscopic technique for element detection that has been used in various fields, including biomedical applications. In clinical settings, it has been used in detecting elemental composition in samples of various complexities, such as human body fluids, on different hard and soft tissues with no or minimal sample preparation. In this work, we aimed to analyze the effects of tissue preparation and storage on the expression of elements in LIBS. These tissue preparation techniques have been divided into 3 categories, namely, fresh frozen, formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue blocks (FFPE), and formalin fixed tissue sections (FFS). The expression of elements using LIBS in fresh frozen oral tissues showed better results compared with the FFPE tissue blocks and FFS owing to the interference of paraffin in the latter two, making fresh frozen tissue samples preferable for LIBS analysis. Extensive research based on a large sample size needs to be implemented to standardize the protocol for tissue preparation before using LIBS for elemental analysis.