Metamaterial formalism approach for advancing the recognition of glioma areas in brain tissue biopsies

Tatjana Gric, Sergei Sokolovski, Nikita Navolokin, Oxana Semyachkina-Glushkovskaya, Edik U. Rafailov

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Early detection of a tumor makes it more probable that the patient will, finally,
beat cancer and recover. The main goal of broadly defined cancer diagnostics is to determine
whether a patient has a tumor, where it is located, and its histological type and severity. The
major characteristic of the cancer affected tissue is the presence of the glioma cells in the
sample. The current approach in diagnosis focuses mainly on microbiological, immunological,
and pathological aspects rather than on the “metamaterial geometry” of the diseases. The
determination of the effective properties of the biological tissue samples and treating them as
disordered metamaterial media has become possible with the development of effective medium
approximation techniques. Their advantage lies in their capability to treat the biological tissue
samples as metamaterial structures, possessing the well-studied properties. Here, we present, for
the first time to our knowledge, the studies on metamaterial properties of biological tissues to
identify healthy and cancerous areas in the brain tissue. The results show that the metamaterial
properties strongly differ depending on the tissue type, if it is healthy or unhealthy. The obtained
effective permittivity values were dependent on various factors, like the amount of different cell
types in the sample and their distribution. Based on these findings, the identification of the cancer
affected areas based on their effective medium properties was performed. These results prove
the metamaterial model capability in recognition of the cancer affected areas. The presented
approach can have a significant impact on the development of methodological approaches toward
precise identification of pathological tissues and would allow for more effective detection of
cancer-related changes.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1607-1615
Number of pages9
JournalOptical Materials Express
Volume10
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Jun 2020

Bibliographical note

Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Funding: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R024898/1); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement (713694); Russian Science Foundation (18-15-00172).

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