Hyperspectral imaging as a new diagnostic tool for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia.

PURPOSE: Cervical cancer screening by visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) during colposcopy can be challenging and is highly dependent on the clinical experience of the examiner. Health-care systems lack qualified physicians able to perform the examination in both industrialized and low- and middle-income countries. Previous work has shown the general potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to discriminate CIN from normal tissue, but clinical translation has been limited due to the lack of medically approved HSI systems. METHODS: In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of a commercially available HSI system for CIN detection in a prospective monocentric clinical trial. RESULTS: By obtaining spectral fingerprints of 41 patients with CIN 1-3 we show that HSI-based differentiation between CIN and normal tissue is possible with high statistical significance. Major spectral differences were seen in the 555-585 wavelength area. CONCLUSION: HSI advances tissue differentiation by associating each pixel with high-dimensional spectra and thereby obtains morphological and biochemical information of the observed tissue. Currently available and medically approved HSI systems may represent a contact- and marker-free examiner-independent method for the diagnosis of CIN.

Characterization of a Cell-Culturing System for the Study of Contact-Independent Extracellular Vesicle Communication.

Appropriate and well-documented in vitro cell-culturing systems are necessary to study the activity and biological function of extracellular vesicles (EVs). The aim of this study was to describe an experimental system, in which dynamic, vesicle-based cell communication can be investigated. A commercially available cell-culturing system was applied to study contact-independent cell communication, which separated two cell populations using a membrane with a pore size of 0.4 µm. The EV exchange characteristics between the two compartments in the culture set-up was preliminarily investigated in a cell-free set-up, and analysed using the Extracellular Vesicle (EV) Array and Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis. The application of the cell-culturing set-up was demonstrated using co-cultures of human primary cells. The effects of the relative placement of the two cell populations on the phenotype of EVs found in the cell supernatant were investigated. The results indicate that this placement can be important for the biological hypothesis that is being investigated. These observations are relevant for short (<24h) as well as long (several days) studies of vesicle-based cell communication. Moreover, the introduced cell-culturing set-up and analytical strategy can be used to study contact-independent vesicle communication in a reproducible manner.