Mid‐infrared spectral microimaging of inflammatory skin lesions

• Published in: Journal of biophotonics 2018-07, Vol.11 (7), p.e201700380-n/a
• Main Authors: Sebiskveradze, David, Bertino, Béatrice, Gaydou, Vincent, Dugaret, Anne‐Sophie, Roquet, Manon, Zugaj, Didier E., Voegel, Johannes J., Jeannesson, Pierre, Manfait, Michel, Piot, Olivier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology; Biological Physics; Biophysics; Cancer; Cell Behavior; Cellular Biology; Dewaxing; Engineering Sciences; Histopathology; Inflammation; IR spectral microimaging; Lesions; Life Sciences; Medical personnel; Molecular chains; Molecular structure; Optics; Organic chemistry; Organs; Paraffin; Paraffins; Parameter sensitivity; Photonic; Physical characteristics; Physicians; Physics; predictive classification; quantitative spectral histopathology; Signal and Image processing; Skin; Skin diseases; skin inflammation; Spectroscopy; Subcellular Processes; Tissue analysis; unsupervised clustering
• ISSN: 1864-063X; 1864-0648
• DOI: 10.1002/jbio.201700380

Skin is one of the most important organs of the human body because of its characteristics and functions. There are many alterations, either pathological or physiological, that can disturb its functioning. However, at present all methods used to investigate skin diseases, non‐invasive or invasive, are based on clinical examinations by physicians. Thus, diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic management rely on the expertise of the practitioner, the quality of the method and the accessibility of distinctive morphological characteristics of each lesion. To overcome the high sensitivity of these parameters, techniques based on more objective criteria must be explored. Vibrational spectroscopy has become as a key technique for tissue analysis in the biomedical research field. Based on a non‐destructive light/matter interaction, this tool provides information about specific molecular structure and composition of the analyzed sample, thus relating to its precise physiopathological state and permitting to distinguish lesional from normal tissues. This label‐free optical method can be performed directly on the paraffin‐embedded tissue sections without chemical dewaxing. In this study, the potential of the infrared microspectroscopy, combined with data classification methods was demonstrated, to characterize at the tissular level different types of inflammatory skin lesions, and this independently from conventional histopathology. The combination of mid‐infrared microimaging and multivariate data processing permits a tissular characterization of inflammatory skin lesions. The approach, performed directly on paraffin‐embedded skin sections, highlights the inflammation areas and reveals subtle molecular alteration associated with the lesions. This study opens the way to a quantitative histology permitting to automatically identify modified structures within inflamed cutaneous tissues.