Weakly Supervised Identification and Localization of Drug Fingerprints Based on Label-Free Hyperspectral CARS Microscopy

Anal Chem. 2023 Jul 25;95(29):10957-10965. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c00979. Epub 2023 Jul 14.

Abstract

Understanding drug fingerprints in complex biological samples is essential for the development of a drug. Hyperspectral coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (HS-CARS) microscopy, a label-free nondestructive chemical imaging technique, can profile biological samples based on their endogenous vibrational contrast. Here, we propose a deep learning-assisted HS-CARS imaging approach for the investigation of drug fingerprints and their localization at single-cell resolution. To identify and localize drug fingerprints in complex biological systems, an attention-based deep neural network, hyperspectral attention net (HAN), was developed. By formulating the task to a multiple instance learning problem, HAN highlights informative regions through the attention mechanism when being trained on whole-image labels. Using the proposed technique, we investigated the drug fingerprints of a hepatitis B virus therapy in murine liver tissues. With the increase in drug dosage, higher classification accuracy was observed, with an average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.942 for the high-dose group. Besides, highly informative tissue structures predicted by HAN demonstrated a high degree of similarity with the drug localization shown by the in situ hybridization staining results. These results demonstrate the potential of the proposed deep learning-assisted optical imaging technique for the label-free profiling, identification, and localization of drug fingerprints in biological samples, which can be extended to nonperturbative investigations of complex biological systems under various biological conditions.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Liver
  • Mice
  • Microscopy* / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Spectrum Analysis, Raman* / methods