Light up the prostate

Abstract

Alexandre Khuskivadze

Despite advances in the diagnosis, a prostate cancer remains as a second cause of cancer death in men worldwide. Existent diagnostic methods cannot detect prostate cancer at early stage and most of them are invasive. This circumstance resulted in searching of simple, non-invasive method for the detection of prostate cancer. In our earlier investigations, we have shown that near infrared radiation (NIR) can be used for the visualization of cancer outgrowth in the prostate in vitro. Recent investigations show that circular polarization light against turbid media has better polarization property, then linear one. Using circularly polarized light improves the quality of image recovery in dense turbid media (in our case-prostate).  In present work we show that circular polarized infrared light enhances cancerous prostate NIR images. 

 Experiments were carried out on the prostates derived from the radical prostatectomy. Infrared light emitting diodes (LED) (850-920 nm) and polarized filters were used for prostate transillumination.  After passing the prostate circular polarized NIR was captured by a charge coupled device (CCD) camera and visualized by computer. Experiments show that the optical density of cancerous and healthy prostate tissues in circularly polarized NIR light significantly differs from each other. Cancerous outgrowths are seen as the dark areas on the bright background.  Results of infrared and pathological investigations, concerning the cancer location, were compared. The comparisons show the coincidence of both findings in all cases.

 In conclusion method of circularly polarized NIR light might be used in future for prostate cancer visualization and diagnosis in vivo.

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