Sources of scattering during 

autofluorescence in tumorigenic 

fibroblasts using monte carlo 

SIMULTATIONS

Abstract

Autofluorescence properties of tissue have been widely used to diagnose various types of malignancies. In this study, we applied Monte Carlo simulations to study autofluorescence properties of cells. We evaluated the contribution of Rayleigh and Mie scattering effects towards fluorescence in an in-vitro model system of normal and tumorigenic fibroblast cells, transfected with an empty vector or the H-ras oncogene respectively.  In the case of normal cells, linearity in emission intensity was observed for densities of up to 1.0x10⁶ cells/ml while it was linear for transformed cells of up to 1.4x10⁶ cells/ml. The results showed that fluorescence emission intensity was higher for normal cells by about 30% compared to the transformed fibroblasts. Monte Carlo simulation studies based on cell volume changes showed a good agreement with the results obtained from the fluorescence experiments. The contribution of Rayleigh scattering was found to be predominant compared to Mie scattering in the simulations. (Cellular and/or nuclear volume changes might account for the difference in the intrinsic fluorescence between normal cells and malignant cells). The Monte Carlo Code (MC), newly developed in our group for this study explains the relative intensities and the observed shift in the centroid in excitation spectra as a function of cell density using the same parameters. The MC code is presented in principle and is proposed for utilization in pre-malignant and cancer diagnosis in experimental systems.

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