Grant: Discovery Horizons

By 2030, new annual cancer diagnoses are expected to increase by 25% in Canada. Surgical excision is an essential part of treatment for most solid tumors. The gold-standard for postoperative cancer margin assessment is the histologic analysis of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides, but this is a complex process that can take from days to weeks before results are returned. Without real-time feedback, it is very difficult to confirm during resection surgery if a negative surgical margin has been achieved. As a result, cancer is left behind in ~20% of initial breast cancer resections, requiring re-excision surgery and/or adjuvant treatments that increase risks, health-care costs, and stress for patients. There is a desperate need for a real-time, non-contact, non-destructive, accurate virtual histology tool for surgical margin assessment in-situ. Recently, the PI patented a new 2nd-generation optical imaging modality called Photoacoustic Remote Sensing (PARS) that can virtually replicate the gold-standard H&E histology from unstained tissue slides. Through this grant, the team will develop, test, and validate the final techniques required to build an advanced surgical cancer microscope capable of real-time, non-contact, 3D multilayered H&E-like images directly in-situ. To progress toward this goal, the team will train five PhD students on the following objectives: Objective 1 (O1; Y1): Build new data acquisition hardware and software to provide a high-resolution image of the cancer margin. Advance novel AI to convert PARS acquisitions to H&E-like images. O2 (Y1-2): Create and validate PARS multi-photon microscopy to enable safe, deep in-situ imaging. O3 (Y3-5): Develop an ultrafast camera-based optical absorption technique to enable real-time feedback. O4 (Y3-5): Devise a novel coherence-gated optical absorption technique to provide real-time multilayered depth-resolved imaging of the cancer margin to guide complete tumour excision in-situ. Trainees will benefit from participating in cutting edge interdisciplinary research (e.g., engineering, artificial intelligence, image processing, medicine) and by developing new microscopy techniques that, in the long-term, will revolutionize surgical oncology.