Photoacoustic spectroscopy in the monitoring of breast tumor development: A pre-clinical study

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer type and its detection at an early stage can reduce the mortality rate substantially. With the aim to detect breast cancer early, by studying tumor progression in nude mice, a pulsed laser induced photoacoustic spectroscopy set up has been designed and developed. MCF-7 cells xenografts were developed using six to eight weeks old female nude mice and tumor tissues were extracted on different days (10th, 15th and 20th Day) post injection and the corresponding photoacoustic spectra were recorded at 281nm excitation. A total of 144 time domain spectra were recorded from 36 animals belonging to the three time points (10th, 15th and 20th day post injection) and converted into frequency domains by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) tools of the MATLAB algorithms and analyzed. The frequency patterns of the tumor masses on 10th, 15th and 20th day of tumor development showed a gradual increase in intensity at certain frequencies, 5.93 x10 ³ Hz, 15.9 x10³ Hz, 29.69 x10³ Hz and 32.5 x10³ Hz in the FFT patterns indicating that these frequencies were more sensitive towards tumor development. Further analysis of the data yielded a clear variation in the spectral parameters with progression of the disease suggesting that the technique may be suitable for early detection of the disease. Thus, we expect that the developed setup may be useful in assessing the different phases of tumor development which may have clinical implications.