Excised Whole Lymph Node Imaging for Cancer Staging with Angular Restriction Dual Fluorescent Optical Projection Tomography

Conventional pathology in sentinel lymph node biopsy fails to sufficiently evaluate the entire tissue volume, resulting in high rates of false negatives. To address this, a novel imaging system is proposed to augment the current protocol by providing high-resolution molecular imaging of the lymph node prior to sectioning, with the goal of guiding pathology. Optical projection tomography (OPT) offers a potential solution but spatial resolution of conventional OPT is generally quite poor in lymph node sized tissue samples. Here, we demonstrate the ability to use angular-restriction with filtered-backprojection to provide sensitive and accurate localization of clinically relevant sized micrometastases in lymph nodes (through Monte Carlo simulations and porcine lymph node metastases models).