Polarized Light for Stromal Morphology Assessment and Optical Biomarker Discovery in Breast Cancer
Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Breast cancer remains a leading cause of oncologic mortality amongst women and a challenging public health issue. The collagen within, and surrounding, breast tumours has been shown to hold prognostic information and offers a potential method of patient risk stratification. This thesis uses polarized light microscopy to examine the collagenous stromal content and morphology in human breast cancer samples. It develops upon a novel form of cross-polarized light microscopy and introduces an accompanying signal and image processing pipeline. This methodological combination is applied to two projects in the context of breast cancer: 1) the development of a computational signature that can distinguish prognostically informative collagen organization patterns and 2) the correlation of collagen abundance and alignment with a popular genomic risk panel, OncotypeDX. The work presented herein can serve as a first step towards alternative methods of collagen assessment and future prognostic testing in breast and other cancers.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Blake Jones
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3160183688