Multiphoton Microscopic Imaging Used In The Early Diagnosis Of Colorectal Cancer

Early lesions of the bowel tissue commonly occur in mucosa and submucosa layer. The variation on the morphology and distribution of the main components in mucosa and submucosa layer is very relevant to the pathology in gastrointestinal system. Hence, the microstructure imaging of those two layers is very important to diagnose early bowel cancer. Multiphoton microscopic imaging technology, based on two-photon excited fluorescence and second harmonic generation, has the ability to obtain microstructure information of biological tissue at different depth. In this paper, firstly, Multichannel mode of multiphoton microscopic imaging technology was used to observe the mucosa and submucosa of rectum tissue. Our results demonstrated that multiphoton microscopic imaging technology can present the microstructure of human normal rectum tissue at the molecular level. Then, we used multiphoton microscope to image30human normal and cancerous colorectal tissue specimen, acquiring TPEF imaging features of glands, goblet cells and cancer cells. We compare these features to the H-E stained images. The results coincides well. Our findings show that multiphoton microscopic imaging has the comparable resolution with pathology. It can quantitatively analyze the microstructure change of colorectal tissue in carcinogenesis. In a word, our findings suggested that multiphoton microscopic imaging technology can be very effective to image microstructure of colorectal tissue, providing more accurate structural information for histopathologic diagnosis of bowel disease. With miniaturization and integration of colonoscopy, MPM has the potential to provide real-time histopathological diagnosis without invasive biopsy for colorectal cancer in the near future.