Quantitative Autofluorescence Imaging of A375 Human Melanoma Cell Samples: A Pilot Study

[摘要] Introduction: Skin cancer is one of the most common types of malignancy worldwide. Humanskin naturally contains several endogenous fluorophores, as potential sources can emit inherentfluorescence, called intrinsic autofluorescence (AF). The melanin endogenous fluorophore in thebasal cell layer of the epidermis seems to have a strong autofluorescence signal among other onesin the skin. This pilot study aimed to investigate the feasibility of the detection of autofluorescencesignals in the A375 human melanoma cell line in the cell culture stage using the FluoVision opticalimaging system.Methods: The human skin melanoma cell line (A375) donated as a gift from Switzerland (UniversityHospital Basel) was cultured. For the imaging of the A375 human melanoma cell sample in thispilot study, the FluoVision optical imaging device (Tajhiz Afarinan Noori Parseh Co) was applied.The proposed clustering image processing code was developed based on the K-mean segmentationmethod, using MATLAB software (version 16).Results: The quantification of color pixels in the color bar along with the intensity score of theautofluorescence signal ranged between 0 and 70 was written in the image processing codeexecution and a threshold higher than 40%, proportional to the ratio of autofluorescent cells. Thepercentage of the signal of A375 autofluorescent melanoma cells in the 3 studied cell samples wascalculated as 3.11%±0.6.Conclusion: This imaging method has the advantage of no need for fluorophore labels over theexisting fluorescence imaging methods, and it can be regarded as one of the important choices oflabel-free imaging for this A375 melanoma cell line containing the intrinsic endogenous fluorophorein cell studies.

[学科分类] 基础医学

[关键词] Human Melanoma A375;Autofluorescence imaging;Segmentation;Quantitative;ImageProcessing