Assessment Of Therapy Response To Preoperative Radiochemotherapy In Rectal Cancer By Multiphoton Microscopy

Rectal cancer is a sort of common malignant tumor of digestive tract and has a high incidence. Even more serious is that there have been accumulating evidences to demonstrate that more and more people will die from this disease. All the time the primary treatment for patients with rectal cancer is surgery, but the result is not always satisfactory. In recent years, preoperative radiochemotherapy that is neoadjuvant therapy has been used increasingly in the management of this group of patients and has obtained a remarkable therapeutic efficacy. Now, neoadjuvant treatment followed by surgery has become the standard of care for locally advanced rectal cancer. However, assessment of treatment response to neoadjuvant therapy is still a clinical challenge.The current medical imaging technologies do not allow the resolution of biological tissue microstructures at the cellular or subcellular level, and therefore cannot provide enough pathological information after preoperative radiochemotherapy in rectal carcinoma. Thus, there is an urgent need of a diagnostic technique which can aid in the tailoring of effective treatment doses and strategies, and avoiding overdiagnosis as well as overtreatment. Multiphoton microscopic imaging can be used to monitor morphologic alterations and biochemical changes in rectal carcinoma following preoperative radiochemotherapy because of its high sensitivity and high resolution for tissue microstructures, and low photo-damage and photo-bleaching as well as high imaging depth in biological tissues.Therefore, this work brings up an investigation on evaluation of therapy response to preoperative radiochemotherapy for rectal carcinoma by multiphoton microscopic imaging technique, mainly including identifying pathologic changes, monitoring tumor response, detecting colloid response and assessing tumor regression grade, and then extracts some feature parameters for the clinical diagnosis. The related research results have been published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (SCI, IF=2.8), BMC Cancer (SCI, IF=3.4), Journal of Biomedical Optics (SCI, IF=2.9), World Journal of Gastroenterology (SCI, IF=2.4) and Lasers in Medical Science (SCI, IF=2.5).In summary, this research gives an entirely new approach to evaluate neoadjuvant treatment response, and these results will provide important fundamental data and scientific evidence for helping multiphoton microscopic imaging technique ultimately develop into "optical biopsy" imaging technique with submicron high spatial resolution, high contrast, and real time in molecular level.