Preliminary studies of elemental spatial redistribution in breast tumors

Abstract

Synchrotron radiation combined with capillary optics has been used as an optimal x-ray source for microanalysis. It can be used to excite x-ray fluorescence and this approach leads to very low detection limits on micrometric areas on very small samples. Synchrotron microscopic XRF (μ-SRXRF) allows quantitative study of the nature and degree of heterogeneity of inorganic constituents in biological samples. This microbeam method, due to intrinsic characteristics of SR, is able to implement multielemental spectrochemical analysis with spatial resolution on the micrometer scale. It shows high efficiency for element determination and short time of analysis requirements. In the present work, we applied μ-SRXRF to study spatial distribution of elements on normal and cancerous human breast tissue in order to identify possible correlations induced by the desease. Several authors have shown that there is a significant increase of Ca, Cr, Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn and Br in breast tumors compared to normal tissues. Since until now the research were mainly going to macroscopic level, it is interesting to study the spatial distribution of these elements to extend the knowledge to the microscopic scale. In these studies spatial redistribution of trace elements due to biochemical changes in tumors may be observed.