Photonics for Nano-applications

Dr. Christos Riziotis, Senior Researcher - Research Associate Professor

Combining group's expertise with practical needs from medical diagnostic and biomedical area has led also to a number of ongoing collaborations in applications like pancreatic islet/cell transplantation, antibiotic delivery, lab-on-chip applications, diagnostic microscopy etc.

In the last example it has been implemented the design and engineering of novel structures with high anticipated use in a number of microscopy based diagnostic techniques such as cytological PAP-Test. Cervical screening based on Papanicolaou (PAP) Test has been proved to be an efficient practice for preventing cervico-vaginal cancer in High Risk Human Papilloma Virus infected women. Introduction of liquid based process combined with automatization and digital image analysis has led to a more reliable diagnosis compared to conventional management of the slides. However, microscopy based diagnosis in Cytology is characterized by a variety of parameters, including specimens’ adequacy, inhomogeneous/discontinuous cell density, fixing/staining procedure quality, and also screeners’ experience and observation ability. Our group introduced a novel real-time screening aid and platform improving diagnosis in Pap -Test slides.

The proposed solution (patented) provides a customizable spatial grid with sequentially ordered and indexed segments than can be attached in different possible ways to the carrier platform (e.g. microscope slide) and can act as a calibration and orientation aid during the screening process. Such grids were developed by a number of technical means and also by Femtosecond Laser Micromachining technique on commercially available borosilicate glass based cover slips.

A set of difficult-borderline diagnostic PAP-Test cases were comparatively analyzed by conventional and grid based screening procedures, respectively. Statistical analysis showed that grid based microscopy led to a dramatically updated diagnosis by identifying a significantly increased number of abnormal cells in a shorter (4 instead of 5 min) screening time per slide compared to conventional microscopy, especially concerning the number of detected neoplastic/cancerous cells.

The grid can be fabricated and integrated in different platforms such as in solid glass cover slips, flexible polymers stripes and thin shelf-adhesive transparent tapes that could be attached afterwards on top of the slides. The grid has been applied, in collaboration with a number of diagnostic labs and university hospitals, both in pathology and also in cytology diagnostic cases such as ASCUS/ASC-H/LGSIL/HGSIL/AGC/INSITU ADENOCA/ADENOCA as well as in "In Situ Hybridization"- ISH techniques, and Immunocytochemistry-Immunohistochemistry (ICC-IHC) protocols for assessment of immunostained cell characteristics.

Key publications

Recent publications