Hyperspectral microscopy combined with DAPI staining for the identification of hepatic carcinoma cells

In this study, the DAPI staining is firstly reported for use in the identification of hepatic carcinoma cells based on hyperspectral microscopy. Nuclei in cancer cells usually contain more aneuploidies than that in normal cells, leading to the change of DNA content. Here, we stain hepatic carcinoma tissues and normal hepatic tissues with 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) which is sensitive to the DNA content as a fluorochrome binds to DNA. Consequently, the difference in DNA content between hepatic carcinoma cells and normal hepatic cells can be identified by the fluorescent spectral characteristics. Harnessing the hyperspectral microscopy, we find that the fluorescent properties of these two kinds of cells are different not only in the intensity but also in the spectral shape. These properties are exploited to train a support vector machine (SVM) model for classifying cells. The results show that the sensitivity and specificity for the identification of 1000 hepatic carcinoma samples are 99.3% and 99.1%, respectively.