Fig. 5 | Scientific Reports

Fig. 5

From: Reflection mode polarimetry guides laser mass spectrometry to diagnostically important regions of human breast cancer tissue

Fig. 5

Polarimetric guidance maps enable efficient contamination-free PIRL-MS analysis of cancerous breast tissue by highlighting fat (to be avoided). Row A shows these guidance maps by discretizing and colour-coding the CC-DOP images through thresholding where red and blue indicate fat and non-fat respectively. Row B shows the colour-coded maps of Row A after automatic smoothing via maximum filtering. Rows C and D show PIRL-MS spectra from non-fat and fatty regions of Cancer Specimen 1, confirming that fatty tissue offers the weakest MS signal and non-fat regions offer the strongest, most feature-rich signal. Additionally, 6 known breast-cancer-correlated m/z peaks are detected in the non-fat region (orange font). Column v depicts the step-wise workflow of polarimetrically-guided PIRL-MS.

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