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At the moment, percutaneous needle biopsy (PNB) remains the gold standard for diagnosing liver cancer. However, the relatively high probability of false-negative results can still be an issue with the method. The introduction of real-time feedback for the precise navigation of the biopsy tool is an up-and-coming technology to immensely reduce the mistakes in taking relevant tissue samples. This work presents the technical details of the developed optical biopsy system, which implements fluorescence lifetime and diffuse reflectance measurements. Also, we demonstrate the most recent results of measurements by the system equipped with a novel needle optical probe, compatible with the 17.5G biopsy needle standard. At the first stage, measurements were verified in the murine model with inoculated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). With that model, we demonstrate that the registered set of independent diagnostic parameters allows us to reliably distinguish the HCC tissue, liver tissue in the control and the metabolically changed liver tissues of animals with the developed HCC tumour. At the second stage, the optical biopsy system was tested during the routing procedure of the transcutaneous biopsy in humans with suspected cancerous processes in the liver. Our results demonstrate that the developed technique can reliably discriminate malignant tumours of different nature (primary HCC and adenocarcinoma metastasis) from liver tissues. We conclude that, being supported by machine learning approaches, the presented technique can significantly decrease the rate of false-negative results for transcutaneous biopsy.
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