Honors Theses

Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

BS

Department

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Faculty Mentor

Silas Leavesley, Ph.D

Advisor(s)

Chandrani Sarkar, Ph.D. and Thomas Rich, Ph.D.

Abstract

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common and deadly cancers worldwide, with a lifetime risk of approximately one in twenty-three for men and one in twenty-five for women. Although early detection significantly improves survival, current diagnostic approaches such as tissue biopsy are invasive, reliant on subjective interpretation, have extended turnaround times, and risk missing flat or depressed lesions that are more difficult to detect than raised polyps. These limitations highlight the need for objective, minimally invasive technologies capable of detecting early tissue changes. This study investigates excitation-scanning hyperspectral imaging (Ex-HSI) as a label-free optical approach for identifying colorectal cancer–associated changes in tissue. Ex- HSI excites tissue across multiple wavelengths and records fluorescence emission at each excitation band, providing high-dimensional spectral data that reflect endogenous fluorophores such as collagen, elastin, NADH, and FAD. Because cancer development involves structural and metabolic changes, these molecular changes are expected to produce measurable spectral shifts. To interpret this complex dataset, principal component analysis (PCA) was applied as a dimensionality reduction technique. After background subtraction and spectral power correction, excitation spectra from regions of interest were normalized and transformed into principal components ranked by explained variance. Initial results from a mouse AOM/DSS colorectal cancer model indicate that PCA allows separation between types of tissue. The findings of this study will guide the development of next-generation fluorescence-based endoscopy techniques aimed at improving early detection of colorectal cancer.

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