The standard-of-care for the detection of laryngeal pathologies involves
distinguishing suspicious lesions from surrounding healthy tissue via
contrasts in colour and texture captured by white-light endoscopy.
However, the technique is insufficiently sensitive and thus leads to
unsatisfactory rates of false negatives. The study shows that laryngeal lesions
can be better detected in real time by taking advantage of differences in the
light-polarization properties of cancer and healthy tissues. By measuring
Differences in polarized-light retardance and depolarization, the technique,
which named ‘surgical polarimetric endoscopy’ (SPE), generates about
one-order-of-magnitude greater contrast than white-light endoscopy,
and hence allows for the better discrimination of cancerous lesions, as
show with patients diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. Polarimetric
imaging of excised and stained slices of laryngeal tissue indicated that
changes in the retardance of polarized light can be largely attributed to
architectural features of the tissue.The study assessed SPE to aid routine
transoral laser surgery for the removal of a cancerous lesion, indicating
that SPE can complement white-light endoscopy for the detection of
laryngeal cancer.
