Divided-aperture confocal Brillouin microscopy for simultaneous high-precision topographic and mechanical mapping

A high-precision multi-dimensional microspectroscopic technique for morphological and properties analysis of cancer cell

Raman and Brillouin scattering are sensitive approaches to detect chemical composition and mechanical elasticity pathology of cells in cancer development and their medical treatment researches. The application is, however, suffering from the lack of ability to synchronously acquire the scattering signals following three-dimensional (3D) cell morphology with reasonable spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. Herein, we propose a divided-aperture laser differential confocal 3D Geometry-Raman-Brillouin microscopic detection technology, by which reflection, Raman, and Brillouin scattering signals are simultaneously in situ collected in real time with an axial focusing accuracy up to 1 nm, in the height range of 200 μm. The divided aperture improves the anti-noise capability of the system, and the noise influence depth of Raman detection reduces by 35.4%, and the Brillouin extinction ratio increases by 22 dB. A high-precision multichannel microspectroscopic system containing these functions is developed, which is utilized to study gastric cancer tissue. As a result, a 25% reduction of collagen concentration, 42% increase of DNA substances, 17% and 9% decrease in viscosity and elasticity are finely resolved from the 3D mappings. These findings indicate that our system can be a powerful tool to study cancer development new therapies at the sub-cell level.

Dataset on capability of suppressing background noise and anti-tilting of divided-aperture differential confocal Raman microscopy system

The dataset describes the mechanism of suppressing the background noise of the divided-aperture differential confocal Raman microscopy system and the range of tilting angles that the system can handle. On the basis of the confocal microscopy (CM), the divided-aperture confocal microscopy divided the pupil plane of the objective lens into the illumination pupil and collection pupil. Compared with the CM, the divided-aperture confocal microscopy only changes the pupil parameters, according to the partially coherent imaging theory, we simulate and analyze the axial response curves of the divided-aperture confocal system and the traditional confocal system. We also simulated the differential confocal response curve at different tilting angles and get the data for the applicability of the differential confocal response curve to see if there is a single zero-crossing point or a good linearity near the zero-crossing point. The goodness-of-fit (GOF) is used to evaluate the accuracy of linear fitting, and can be used as a simple measure method of linearity. And the closer the GOF value is to 1, the higher fitting accuracy is. Through simulation analysis, we can have a better understanding of the advances of divided-aperture differential confocal Raman microscopy.