Random lasing in human tissues embedded with organic dyes for cancer diagnosis

Abstract

Various nanostructures found in biological organisms are often complex and they exhibit unique optical functions. This study surprisingly found that typical random lasing occurs in cancerous human tissues embedded with the nanotextured organic dye 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-tert-butyl-6-(1,1,7,7- tetramethyljulolidyl-9-enyl)-4H-pyran (DCJTB). Hematoxylin and eosin stain images show that there are more laser resonators in cancerous tissues, caused by a large number of disordered scatters. It is also noteworthy that the random lasing thresholds were found to relate to the tumor malignancy grade. Consequently, the resulting typical random lasing resonators differ between cancerous tissues in different malignancy grades. Further studies are warranted to investigate tissue optical spectroscopy in the field of cancer diagnostics.