Imaging infrared spectroscopy for fixation-free liver tumor detection

Infrared (IR) imaging spectroscopy of human liver tissue slices has been used to identify and characterize a liver metastasis of breast origin (mucinous carcinoma) which was surgically removed from a consenting patient and frozen without formalin fixation or dehydration procedures, so that lipids and water remain in the tissues. Previously, a set of IR metrics was determined for tumors in fixation-free liver tissues facilitating a k-means cluster analysis differentiating tumor from nontumor. Different and more in depth aspects of these results are examined in this work including three metric color imaging, differencing for lipid identification, and a new technique to simultaneously fit band lineshapes and their 2nd derivatives in order to better characterize protein changes.