X-ray diffraction method to identify epithelial to mesenchymal transition in breast cancer tissue

Breast Stromal tissue is significantly involved in the spread of cancer because of molecular variations. The main component, collagen, has a spatial arrangement allowing the investigation of its structural patterns in tissues by X-ray diffraction (XRD). Since detection and classification of tumor type and stage from the pathological examinations is a laborious task that additionally does not allow cancer detection in the early stages, development of new tools to improve the diagnostic power of pathologists is still needed. In this study, the potential used of XRD tecniques as one of the method for early detection of breast cancer was done. Four pathological cancerous breast tissue samples were taken from four different patients; where two samples are with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (P-EMT) and two samples are without epithelial to mesenchymal transition (N-EMT). The latter was incorporated at an angle interval of 10° to 80° to obtain interference diffraction pattern of XRD of human malignant tissues. This was done to determine molecular structure changes of collagen fiber within the tissue and their potential relation to the changes in cancerous tissue toward metastasis. The results showed that the momentum transfer values for the first region of N-EMT, P-EMT cancerous tissue are not significantly different for both cancerous breast tissue types, being at 1.61 ± 1.74 nm −1 . The average peaks of the second region were determined for N-EMT at 3.4 ± 3.5 nm −1 and P-EMT at 3.6 ± 3.7 nm − which is attributed to water content of the tissues, due to the greater intensity of the P-EMT compared to that of N-EMT. Principal component analysis (PCA) used to confirm statistical appropriateness of the results, showed a normal distribution within 95% confidence level. P-EMT clusters have a larger number of scatter plots compared to N-EMT, which indicates a higher similarity between P-EMT samples than between N-EMT samples, thus confirming the difference between positive and negative-EMT clusters. The curent analysis can differentiate XRD features and thus confirms its effectiveness in detecting the molecular correlation of abnormal collagen fiber structure within epithelial change, and is useful for early diagnosis even case of dense breasts.