Cost-Effective Near Infrared Fluorescence Wide-Field Camera for Breast Tumor Imaging

Near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence imaging has long been proven useful for numerous medical applications, especially image-guided surgery since it can deeply penetrate tissue and acquire a fluorescence image from the FDA-approved fluorescence dye known as indocyanine green (ICG). NIR imaging-guided surgery can help enhance outcomes by better defining surgical margins and minimizing operative time. However, most commercial NIR fluorescence imaging systems are bulky and expensive. In this work, we introduce a low-cost and portable NIR fluorescence imaging system. The proposed system exploits an inexpensive complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based on Nyxel ^® technology, considerably improving quantum efficiency (QE) in the NIR range. Therefore, it can acquire a NIR fluorescence image with outstanding quality. Furthermore, we conjugated ICG with nanoworm particles (NWs-ICG) since nanoparticle-conjugated dye can increase accumulation in a tumor. We show impressive applications of our system for ex vivo tissues and in vivo image-guided surgery using NWs-ICG as a contrast agent for breast tumors from transgenic mice.