Panoramic imaging of whole tumor resection surfaces

The frontline curative strategy for prostate cancer is surgical removal of the entire organ via radical prostatectomy. Achieving cancer free surgical margins during surgical treatment for prostate cancer is critical to prevent tumor recurrence and reduce the need for costly adjuvant procedures. The positive surgical margin rate can exceed 50% for more advanced prostate cancers. Frozen section analysis can be utilized to evaluate only a small portion of the margin, therefore intraoperative surgical margin evaluation is limited by time-consuming, labor-intensive, and tissue-destructive processing steps. To address these limitations, we are using structured illumination microscopy (SIM) to rapidly image the surface of excised organs for point-of-care margin evaluation. Current projects include clinical studies utilizing SIM to image freshly excised prostate and kidney surgical margins for intraoperative margin evaluation. In these projects, we also incorporate 3D scanning of the whole organ in order to develop a clinical atlas matching features observed on VR-SIM to 3D anatomy and traditionally stained tissue slides. Our method will allow pathologists to view SIM images with pathologically relevant contrast in subcellular detail in an intuitive 3D space using telepathology.