Abstract
BACKGROUND: Accurate and rapid intraoperative tumor margin assessment remains a major challenge in surgical oncology. Current gold-standard methods, such as frozen section histology, are time-consuming, operator-dependent, and prone to misclassification, which limits their clinical utility. OBJECTIVE: To develop and evaluate a novel hyperspectral imaging (HSI) workflow that integrates deep learning with three-dimensional (3D) tumor modeling for real-time, label-free tumor margin delineation in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). METHODS: Freshly resected HNSCC samples were snap-frozen and imaged ex vivo from multiple perspectives using a standardized HSI protocol, resulting in a 3D model derived from HSI. Each sample was serially sectioned, stained, and annotated by pathologists to create high-resolution 3D histological reconstructions. The volumetric histological models were co-registered with the HSI data (n = 712 Datacubes), enabling voxel-wise projection of tumor segmentation maps from the HSI-derived 3D model onto the corresponding histological ground truth. Three deep learning models were trained and validated on these datasets to differentiate tumor from non-tumor regions with high spatial precision. RESULTS: This work demonstrates strong potential for the proposed HSI system, with an overall classification accuracy of 0.98 and a tumor sensitivity of 0.93, underscoring the system's ability to reliably detect tumor regions and showing high concordance with histopathological findings. CONCLUSION: The integration of HSI with deep learning and 3D tumor modeling offers a promising approach for precise, real-time intraoperative tumor margin assessment in HNSCC. This novel workflow has the potential to improve surgical precision and patient outcomes by providing rapid, label-free tissue differentiation.