A proof-of-concept study of optical tissue sensing during vacuum-assisted breast biopsy procedures.

StudyMinimally invasive therapy & allied technologies : MITAT : official journal of the Society for Minimally Invasive Therapy· Aug 2026

A proof-of-concept study of optical tissue sensing during vacuum-assisted breast biopsy procedures.

Lianne Feenstra, Caroline A Drukker, Frederieke Van Duijnhoven … Theo J M Ruers

Read paper

Breast & Gynecologic PathologyStudyQ2IF 1.8

Optical tissue sensing distinguished malignant from healthy breast tissue with 86% accuracy

A proof-of-concept study of optical tissue sensing during vacuum-assisted breast biopsy procedures.

Lianne Feenstra … Theo J M Ruers

Minimally invasive therapy & allied technologies · Aug 2026

Background

Vacuum-assisted breast biopsy (vacuum-assisted breast biopsy) enables minimally invasive sampling of breast lesions but provides no real-time information about the tissue being sampled, potentially leading to sampling bias.

Methods

A fiber-equipped introducer compatible with a standard Hologic vacuum-assisted breast biopsy system was developed to acquire diffuse reflectance spectroscopy measurements without altering the clinical workflow.

Results

spectroscopy correctly told cancer from healthy tissue most of the time

91%

Sensitivity

82%

Specificity

More results

A total of 300 biopsies were correlated with histopathology, yielding a balanced dataset of 248 spectra.

The patient-wise approach achieved 76%, 85%, and 70%, respectively.

“

Conclusion · 1 of 2

This proof-of-concept study demonstrates that diffuse reflectance spectroscopy can be integrated into the vacuum-assisted breast biopsy workflow using a novel optical introducer and discriminate malignant from healthy tissue in ex vivo breast specimens, supporting technical feasibility.

Conclusion · 2 of 2

Further clinical studies are needed to establish its diagnostic value.

A proof-of-concept study of optical tissue sensing during vacuum-assisted breast biopsy procedures.

A proof-of-concept study of optical tissue sensing during vacuum-assisted breast biopsy procedures.

Related papers