Non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) is a severe male infertility condition characterized by impaired or absent sperm production in the testes. The primary treatment for NOA is microsurgical testicular sperm extraction (micro-TESE), which relies on accurately identifying healthy seminiferous tubules. In addressing this clinical need, we propose the utilization of mid-infrared photothermal (MIP) microscopy to identify spectroscopic signatures associated with NOA. Our preliminary results revealed that NOA tissues exhibited distinctive lipid distribution and reduced lipid peak intensity compared to tissues with normal sperm production. Leveraging principal components analysis (PCA), we successfully extracted key infrared spectroscopic features. When combined with logistic regression (LR), this approach achieved an impressive prediction accuracy of 95.0% in classifying testicular tissues. These findings highlight the potential of MIP microscopy in facilitating sperm retrieval by distinguishing seminiferous tubules based on their molecular composition.
Infrared (IR) spectroscopy depicts molecular structure and dynamics based on vibrational absorption of chemical bonds. Spatially resolved IR spectroscopy, i.e. IR imaging, further enabled label-free in situ chemical imaging for dynamics in complex systems. However, IR imaging suffers from low spatial resolution at a few micrometers due to diffraction limit, thus having difficulty in applications such as sub-cellular imaging. Recently, by visible light probing of the photothermal effect of vibrational absorption, mid-infrared photothermal imaging (MIP) overcomes the limitations of conventional IR microscopy and has achieved sub-micron resolution. In this work, we built an optimized MIP system to boost the spatial resolution and sensitivity, and demonstrated MIP imaging of nanometer-sized polymeric microspheres and living cells with a high spatial resolution of 200 nm.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.