Label-Free Neurosurgical Pathology with Stimulated Raman Imaging: A Dataset

The goal of brain tumor surgery is to maximize tumor removal without injuring critical brain structures. Achieving this goal is challenging since it can be difficult to distinguish tumor from non-tumor tissue. While standard histopathology provides information that could assist tumor delineation, it cannot be performed iteratively during surgery as freezing, sectioning, and staining of the tissue require too much time. Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy is a powerful label-free chemical imaging technology that enables rapid mapping of lipids and proteins within a fresh specimen. This information can be rendered into pathology-like images. Although this approach has been used to assess the density of glioma cells in murine orthotopic xenografts models and human brain tumors, tissue heterogeneity in clinical brain tumors has not yet been fully evaluated with SRS imaging. Here we profile 41 specimens resected from 12 patients with a range of brain tumors. By evaluating large-scale stimulated Raman imaging data and correlating this data with current clinical gold standard of histopathology for 4,422 fields of view, we capture many essential diagnostic hallmarks for glioma classification. Notably, in fresh tumor samples we observe additional features, not seen by conventional methods, including extensive lipid droplets within glioma cells, collagen deposition in gliosarcoma, and irregularity and disruption of myelinated fibers in areas infiltrated by oligodendroglioma cells. This dataset is released in Harvard Dataverse to foster diagnostic training and to permit additional interrogation. Our work establishes the methodology and provides a significant collection of reference images for label-free neurosurgical pathology. For more details, please refer to our paper published on Cancer Research (doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-16-0270).脑肿瘤手术的核心目标是在不损伤关键脑组织结构的前提下最大化切除肿瘤组织。达成该目标颇具挑战性，因为肿瘤组织与非肿瘤组织往往难以精准区分。标准组织病理学虽可提供有助于肿瘤边界划定的相关信息，但无法在手术中反复开展——因为组织的冷冻、切片与染色过程耗时过长。受激拉曼散射（Stimulated Raman Scattering, SRS）显微镜是一种高性能无标记化学成像技术，可快速实现新鲜标本内脂质与蛋白质的空间分布成像，并生成类病理图像。尽管该方法已被用于评估小鼠原位异种移植模型及人类脑肿瘤中的神经胶质瘤细胞密度，但临床脑肿瘤的组织异质性尚未通过SRS成像得到全面评估。本研究对12名罹患各类脑肿瘤的患者切除的41份标本进行了分析：通过对大规模受激拉曼成像数据进行解析，并将其与当前临床金标准——组织病理学的4422个视野数据进行关联，我们捕捉到了神经胶质瘤分类所需的多项关键诊断特征。值得注意的是，在新鲜肿瘤样本中，我们观察到了传统方法未发现的额外特征，包括神经胶质瘤细胞内广泛存在的脂滴、胶质肉瘤中的胶原沉积，以及少突胶质细胞瘤细胞浸润区域内有髓神经纤维的不规则性与断裂。本数据集已发布于哈佛数据文库（Harvard Dataverse），以助力诊断模型训练与后续的额外研究。本研究确立了相关方法学体系，并为无标记神经外科病理领域提供了大量高质量参考图像。如需了解更多细节，请参阅发表于《癌症研究》（Cancer Research）的论文，其DOI为10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-16-0270。