Digitized Honors Theses (2002-2017)

Date of Award

5-2017

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

BS

Department

Biomedical Sciences

Faculty Mentor

Silas Leavesley

Abstract

Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Early detection and diagnosis is a very important step in reducing morbidity and mortality making the ultimate goal of screening exams to identify lesions prior to advancement into cancer or tissue invasion. The objective of this study is to examine the potential of hyperspectral imaging for measuring spectral changes that are concurrent with changes in colon cancer compared to surrounding normal tissue.

Specimen pairs of fresh normal and adenocarcinoma were obtained from surgical resections of colon tissue in collaboration with the University of South Alabama Departments of Surgery and Pathology. All procedures were carried out in accordance with Institutional Review Board protocol # 13-120.

The colon tissues from normal and cancerous regions were scanned by excitation scanning hyperspectral imaging using a novel microscope constructed at the University of South Alabama. Multi ple fields of view (FOV) were acquired from each specimen and MATLAB and ENVI software were used to correct for background signal and to draw regions of interest and extract the average spectra for each region. When comparing spectra averaged over several areas of normal colon, results demonstrated consistent spectral information with similar peak wavelengths and shapes. However, in colon cancer, extracted spectra demonstrated high heterogeneity. High spectral heterogeneity likely indicates variation in structural organization and molecular composition that is divergent from normal tissue composition. Results from an automated classification of Maximum Likelihood yielded high sensitivity (97.91) and high specificity (92.75) values, showing that there was a high probability that a cancerous pixel was correctly classified as cancerous and a high probability that a normal pixel was correctly classified as normal respectively. A high overall accuracy (94.99%) showed that there was a high percentage of correctly identified pixels. We conclude that hyperspectral fluorescence excitation-scanning (HIFEX)may be a viable technology for detecting abnormal changes in colon tissue based on detected spectral changes in the mucosa of the colon. This information could be used to provide new methods for early diagnosis of colon cancer.

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