# Intraoperative Polarization-Sensitive OCT for Assessing Breast Tumor Margins

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN · 2021 · $450,386

## Abstract

SUMMARY
Breast cancer is a global healthcare burden, not only for the patients diagnosed with this disease, but also their
families and friends. The surgical treatment of breast cancer, while successful, has significant limitations that
increase patient anxiety, increase costs, and can increase the risk for local recurrence and lifelong post-operative
complications. A primary limitation stems from the lack of an intraoperative microscopic assessment of surgical
tumor margins. Our cohesive and productive team with academic, clinical, and industrial representation has
successfully developed and demonstrated for the first time the use of intraoperative optical coherence
tomography (OCT) for in vivo human imaging of tumor margins during breast cancer surgery using a novel
handheld surgical imaging probe. Additionally, the development and use of interferometric synthetic aperture
microscopy (ISAM) for in vivo imaging has shown an important improvement in resolution and depth-of-field.
Despite these advances, challenges remain for identifying tissue microstructure, particularly between normal
fibrous stroma and dense tumor tissue, which are both highly scattering structures. To address these challenges,
we propose the novel and innovative application of polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) and PS-ISAM for
intraoperative in vivo imaging in human breast cancer surgery, and hypothesize that these will improve the
detection sensitivity and specificity of positive breast tumor margins over standard OCT/ISAM. Realizing that the
presence and progression of cancer significantly alters the collagen-based tissue microenvironment, the use of
PS-OCT to sensitively detect and quantify birefringence of tissue collagen offers the potential for earlier detection
of cancer and the altered microenvironment. By leveraging ISAM and other computational optical image
segmentation algorithms, we can more fully characterize the tissue/tumor microenvironment. Through four
specific aims, we will implement hardware and innovative software contributions to construct an intraoperative
multi-mode system capable of real-time OCT/ISAM and PS-OCT/PS-ISAM, then use this system to investigate
the performance of these imaging modes in clinical human studies to determine the sensitivity and specificity of
ex vivo and in vivo PS-OCT/PS-ISAM over standard OCT/ISAM, and against the standard-of-care assessments
which include post-operative histopathology and intraoperative visual/tactile cues. The successful completion of
this project is expected to establish the clinical intraoperative use of these new optical imaging techniques, with
the goal of reducing the current unacceptably high reoperation rates in the surgical treatment of breast cancer.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10056206
- **Project number:** 5R01CA213149-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
- **Principal Investigator:** Stephen A Boppart
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $450,386
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-12-15 → 2022-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10056206

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10056206, Intraoperative Polarization-Sensitive OCT for Assessing Breast Tumor Margins (5R01CA213149-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10056206. Licensed CC0.

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