A method to detect thermal damage in bovine liver utilising diffuse reflectance spectroscopy

When light is illuminated using a broad spectrum and detected without physical contact between source and detector the method is often referred as diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). Combined with newest computational algorithms, DRS may reach high performance in near future in tissue characterization and pathology. In this study, we show that DRS can be used to automatically differentiate untreated fresh liver tissue from heat-induced and chemically induced tissue denaturation in bovine liver ex vivo. For this, we used a thresholding algorithm that was developed and tested using 10-fold cross validation. Our results indicate that DRS has potential to detect pathological tissue processes that result in tissue injury and ultimately tissue necrosis. The detection of necrosis is important for many medical applications, not least for tissue sampling by biopsy needle, where additional guidance to commonly used ultrasound would be welcome. Furthermore, cancer tissue is prone to necrosis as a result of tissue hypoxia and due to cancer treatments.