26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Metalens-enabled optical palpation for single-shot cancer detection

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Speaker

Qi Fang (The University of Western Australia)

Description

Cancer remains a leading cause of global mortality, with surgical resection serving as the primary curative-intent treatment for early-stage solid tumours. During these interventions, surgeons routinely rely on manual palpation to delineate tumour margins, based on distinct mechanical contrast between rigid malignant lesions and more compliant surrounding stroma. Despite its ubiquity, manual palpation is fundamentally limited by its inherent subjectivity and poor spatial resolution, often missing small lesions and resulting in positive surgical margins and elevated rates of local recurrence. While quantitative optical elastography techniques offer a promising solution, their translation into surgical environments has been severely bottlenecked. Previous optical elastography setups rely on bulky refractive optics, leading to prohibitive physical footprints, complex alignment requirements, and severe spatial-temporal drift. This constrains intraoperative in vivo compatibility, leaving the realisation of a fully integrated, robust, and label-free optical elastography device for minimally invasive or robotic surgery an unresolved challenge.

In this work, we introduce metalens stereoscopic optical palpation (MSOP), a highly integrated, compact stereoscopic imaging platform for the single-shot optical capture and digital reconstruction of mechanical contrast in biological tissues. By multiplexing dual parallax images onto a single CMOS sensor through an integrated binocular metalens, we successfully identify neoplastic lesions from surrounding benign tissue based on their intrinsic mechanical contrast, demonstrating the first application of a binocular metalens to a functional biomedical diagnostic task. We validated the translational potential of this MSOP platform across diverse oncological targets, including mouse pancreatic cancer models as well as human breast and liver surgical specimens. Our results confirm MSOP’s capacity to map complex mechanical profiles to precisely delineate solid tumour boundaries across versatile biological and clinical settings.