Collagen has hierarchical structure and often undergoes remodeling at the tumor margin [1]. Polarimetric second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy can be used to investigate changes in the collagen structure and provide insight into the metastatic progression of cancer. In this work, we apply double Stokes-Mueller polarimetry (DSMP) to investigate the disorder of collagen at the tumor margin. The disorder is analyzed at several levels of spatial organization – texture analysis (gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) method) is applied at the microscopic tissue organizational level, while ultrastructure is analyzed with DSMP to obtain nonlinear susceptibility tensor for each image voxel. This allows to comprehensively investigate the changes occurring in collagen during tumor progression.
[1] Winkler, J. et al., “Concepts of extracellular matrix remodelling in tumour progression and metastasis”, Nat Commun 11, 5120 (2020).
|