This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 11643, including the Title Page, Copyright information, and Table of Contents.

Checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapy (CPI) has ushered in a new era in cancer treatment. CPI has shown promising outcomes in clinical studies, particularly in treating melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and a number of other cancers. However, CPI, currently using antibodies to CTLA-4, PD-1, and PD-L1, also has limitations. In most cases CPI can only be effective in a small percentage of patients of a given cancer. The major obstacles include initial resistance, refraction after initial response, high cost, and potential autoimmune side effects (particularly with high dose of checkpoint inhibitors). Biophotonics-based immunotherapy (BPI) uses a combination of phototherapy and immunostimulant, often through a local intervention. BPI has shown a great potential in inducing systemic, tumor-specific immunity against the target tumor. It has been used to treat metastatic cancers with promising outcomes. We anticipate that BPI can synergize with CPI by providing the quality and

Immunotherapies hold high promise for the treatment of metastatic cancers. However, as a systemic approach, current immunotherapies have only achieved limited success in clinical studies. A local intervention-based immunotherapy has the potential to improve the therapeutic efficacy and to reduce systemic negative side effects of the immunotherapies. Specifically, the local treatment, together with appropriate immunological stimulation can change the tumor microenvironment to potentiate a tumor-specific immunity through the increased quantity and improved quality of tumor-infiltrating T cells. We used local, non-invasive laser irradiation of mammary tumors in a mouse model, followed by local administration of an immunostimulant. The treatment significantly delayed tumor growth and prolonged the animal survival. After the treatment, tumor-infiltrating immune cells were analyzed at the cellular and transcriptional levels. The specific responses of different subsets of immune cells

The ideal strategy for treating metastatic cancers is a systemic, tumor-specific immunity induced by a local intervention. A local intervention-based immunotherapy was developed following this strategy: a local photothermal therapy (PTT), followed by an intratumoral administration of a potent immunostimulant, N-dihydrogalactochitosan (GC). This approach has shown great promise in preclinical and preliminary clinical studies. To understand the immunological mechanism of photo-immunotherapy, we used this local intervention-based immunotherapy to treat highly aggressive, metastatic breast tumors in a mouse model. We analyzed tumor-infiltrating immune cells. We observed a large number of infiltrating immune cells and increased immune activities in the treated tumors and secondary lymphoid organs (spleens). At the transcription level, we observed enriched both innate and adoptive immune cytokine signaling pathways in adaptive immune cells after the treatment of this local intervention

Carbon quantum dots (CQDs) are an emerging research area in the biomedical field due to their biocompatibility and multifunctionality. Herein, we report CQDs synthesized in a green, fast, facile manner in a recyclable mineral oilmediated pyrolysis medium using citric acid as the main carbon source and thiourea as N- and S-doping source. The assynthesized CQDs exhibit excitation-dependent photoemission (Φ = 0.57) with notable energy upconversion behavior at longer wavelengths, suggesting possible utilization in multiphoton microscopy. FT-IR characterization suggest diverse functional groups on the surface which include carboxylic acids, amines, and thiocyanates among others. Photothermal analysis supported the NIR-emissive behavior and showed that CQD solution temperature could potentially increase nearly 20°C higher after 10 min irradiation by 630-nm LED laser source powered at 1 W/cm2. CQDs have been tested in vitro and has been used as multicolor cellular imaging agent.

The small-animal photoacoustic microscope can obtain microscopic imaging of small-animal tissues, and then quantitatively analyzes the blood vessel density, tumor distribution and treatment effect during photodynamic therapy. Through the different imaging modes of the depth-coded photoacoustic microscope, the three-dimensional structural information of the tumor tissue can be reconstructed. In this study, the small-animal photoacoustic microscope was used to quantitatively visualize the density, depth, and distribution of different specific absorbers during photodynamic therapy. This method successfully monitored the tumor's response during treatment, which indicates its good prospect in monitoring of photodynamic therapy. Overall, the small-animal photoacoustic microscope can dynamically monitor and evaluate the impact of photodynamic therapy on tumors, blood vessels, skin irritation and inflammation, etc. This is of great significance for the efficacy and safety evaluation of the development of therapeutic drugs. Therefore, the small-animal photoacoustic microscope has great potential in the biomedical research of basic biology.

The incorporation of an immunologic adjuvant to enhance the immune response is a standard practice for modern vaccines. In the past decade, researchers have consistently reported a new approach to augment the immune response to vaccine by brief treatment of the skin with laser light without appreciable adverse effects. To date, four classes of laser adjuvant have been established. Amongst these, pulsed and non-pulsed laser adjuvant merit further development because of their established efficacy and safety in animal models. Such a technology offers a valuable choice of immunologic adjuvant for accelerated vaccine development against emerging infectious diseases including COVID-19.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) scheme to facilitate breast mass classification, which is based on the latest transferring generative adversarial networks (GAN) technology. Although GAN is one of the most popular techniques for image augmentation, it requires a relatively large original dataset to achieve satisfactory results, which may not be available for most of the medical imaging tasks. To address this challenge, we developed a novel transferring GAN, which was built based on the deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGAN). This novel model was first pre-trained on a dataset of non-mass mammogram patches. Then the generator and the discriminator were fine-tuned on the mass dataset. A supervised loss was integrated with the discriminator, such that it can be used to directly classify the benign/malignant masses. We retrospectively assembled a total of 25,000 non-mass patches and 1024 mass images to assess this model, using classification accuracy and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The results demonstrated that our proposed approach improved the accuracy and area under the ROC curve (AUC) by 6.0% and 3.5% respectively, when compared with the classifiers trained without conventional data augmentation. This investigation may provide a new perspective for researchers to effectively train the GAN models on medical imaging tasks with limited datasets.

Dual-modality photoacoustic/ultrasonic endoscopy has shown to be effective in the identification and staging of colorectal intramural tumors. In this study, we proposed a dual-modality endoscope with a spherical hollow PVDF-based transducer, which achieves center frequency of 34 MHz and -6 dB bandwidth of 15-60 MHz. The PVDF-based transducer will enable the system to achieve a large radial imaging range of more than 1 cm. In vivo imaging of the rabbit rectum proved that the dual-modality endoscope has the ability to perform the tissue stratification of the intestinal wall and the high-resolution visualization of the intestinal wall vascular network.

Since biological chromophores typically show several absorption peaks, the specific effects of photobiomodulation would be induced with a combination of two wavelengths, rather than a single wavelength of near-infrared (NIR) light. Single cell live imaging of T cells treated with a combination of 1064 and 1270 nm NIR lasers revealed that the treatment modulated intracellular calcium and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in T cells, which are known to be critical regulators of their function. The treatment with a specific combination of NIR wavelengths of low power laser could be further explored for therapeutic purposes including immunotherapy for cancer and allergy.