Investigating the backscattering characteristics of individual normal and cancerous cells based on experimentally determined three-dimensional refractive index distributions

Abstract

The progression of epithelial dysplasia is accompanied by changes of sub-cellular structures which alter light scattering, particularly backscattering, properties of epithelial cells. In this study, we quantified the refractive index (RI) distributions of normal and cancerous epithelial cells of skin and oral cavity using digital holographic microtomography and investigated the backscattering characteristics of the cells using finite-difference time-domain simulations. The results show that cancerous cells present higher average values of nuclear and nucleolar RI and a higher standard deviation of cytoplasmic RI than normal cells. Both the total scattering and backscattering cross-sections of the cancerous cells are significantly higher than those of the normal cells.