Desmoplastic stiffening of breast carcinoma is the bulk scale manifestation of the extra-cellular matrix (ECM) micromechanical remodeling during neoplastic transformation. We have developed a novel optical imaging technology, termed laser speckle micro-rheology (LSM) for evaluating the micro-mechanical properties of tissue and investigating the implications of the mechano-pathological phenomena to the disease progression. Here, we present a new enhancement to the LSM processing scheme to extract the optical properties from speckle patterns and correct for residual speckle modulations to quantify the shear viscoelastic modulus of breast tissues. By accounting for optical variations, we observed an increased significance in the shear moduli differences between benign lesions and tumors and also between tumors of different histological diagnosis.

Date Published: 9 March 2020
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Proc. SPIE 11239, Dynamics and Fluctuations in Biomedical Photonics XVII, 112390I (9 March 2020); doi: 10.1117/12.2547207

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11239:
Dynamics and Fluctuations in Biomedical Photonics XVII
Valery V. Tuchin; Martin J. Leahy; Ruikang K. Wang, Editor(s)