Emerging technology for intraoperative margin assessment and post-operative tissue diagnosis for breast-conserving surgery

•Breast cancer early detection is vital for life saving and fast recovery. Where, the presented optical imaging system incorporating a hyperspectral camera could provide a fast, non-invasive method to assist the surgeons and avoid cancer recurrence.•Light has different penetration depths regarding the selected wavelength. Therefore, multiple excitation wavelength within range (390∼980 nm) can help to identify the tumor stage with respect to the pathological investigation.•Breast cancer tissues had a spectral signature at wavelength 447 nm which was highly reflected versus the normal tissues.•Hyperspectral imaging is an emerging technology in the biomedical field sector, which is capable to identify and contour delineation of the breast cancer margins for the investigated tissues. Tissue-preserving surgery is utilized progressively in cancer therapy, where a clear surgical margin is critical to avoid cancer recurrence, specifically in breast cancer (BC) surgery. The Intraoperative pathologic approaches that rely on tissue segmenting and staining have been recognized as the ground truth for BC diagnosis. Nevertheless, these methods are constrained by its complication and timewasting for tissue preparation. We present a non-invasive optical imaging system incorporating a hyperspectral (HS) camera to discriminate between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues in ex-vivo breast specimens, which could be an intraoperative diagnostic technique to aid surgeons during surgery and later a valuable tool to assist pathologists. We have established a hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) system comprising a push-broom HS camera at wavelength 380∼1050 nm with source light 390∼980 nm. We have measured the investigated samples' diffuse reflectance (Rd), fixed on slides from 30 distinct patients incorporating mutually normal and ductal carcinoma tissue. The samples were divided into two groups, stained tissues during the surgery (control group) and unstained samples (test group), both captured with the HSI system in the visible and near-infrared (VIS-NIR) range. Then, to address the problem of the spectral nonuniformity of the illumination device and the influence of the dark current, the radiance data were normalized to yield the radiance of the specimen and neutralize the intensity effect to focus on the spectral reflectance shift for each tissue. The selection of the threshold window from the measured Rd is carried out by exploiting the statistical analysis by calculating each regio