Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy Imaging of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Tissues

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) ranks among the malignancies with the highest fatality and morbidity rates. This is predominantly attributable to an absence of understanding the intricate and diverse microenvironment of the tumor. We use terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) imaging in transmission geometry to probe ex-vivo the heterogenous microenvironment of the genetically modified murine PDAC tissue that closely resembles the PDAC heterogeneity in human malignancy. We introduced a maximum a-posteriori probability estimation algorithm to objectively the tumor's heterogenous microenvironment using the average values of refractive index and absorption coefficient within the useable terahertz bandwidth as imaging markers. Direct comparison of stained histopathologic images and the refractive index and the absorption coefficient high-resolution, two-dimensional maps of the same PDAC samples confirms the high potential of the THz-TDS method for tumor tissue characterization.