Detecting precancerous lesions in the hamster cheek pouch using spectroscopic white-light optical coherence tomography to assess nuclear morphology via spectral oscillations

Abstract

Abstract. We have developed a novel dual-window approach for spectroscopic optical coherence tomography ͑OCT͒ measurements and applied it to probe nuclear morphology in tissue samples drawn from the hamster cheek pouch carcinogenesis model. The dualwindow approach enables high spectral and depth resolution simultaneously, allowing detection of spectral oscillations, which we isolate to determine the structure of cell nuclei in the basal layer of the epithelium. The measurements were executed with our parallel frequency domain OCT system, which uses light from a thermal source, providing high bandwidth and access to the visible portion of the spectrum. The structural measurements show a highly statistically significant difference between untreated ͑normal͒ and treated ͑hyperplastic/dysplastic͒ tissues, indicating the potential utility of this approach as a diagnostic method.

Optical Spectroscopy of Biological Cells

“…Comparison of these findings with confocal fluorescence imaging shows that fLCI accurately measures the size of the nucleus along the longitudinal direction, which is a result of the small acceptance angle of the interferometer and the axial sectioning capabilities of LCI. This in vitro cell study confirmed the potential of using fLCI to measure the size of cell nuclei and has served as the basis for a number of studies that demonstrate its capability in turbid media [15], and also confirmed the potential for detecting early signs of cancerous development in animal models [16,17].…”

Assessing hemoglobin concentration using spectroscopic optical coherence tomography for feasibility of tissue diagnostics

“…The DW method is simply the product of two STFT's with different window sizes, which, if judiciously chosen, can be used to independently tune the spatial and spectral resolution [11]. We have demonstrated the use of the DW for SOCT, in combination with Fourier domain LCI (fLCI) and light scattering spectroscopy (LSS), to probe morphological features in tissue phantoms [8], and for obtaining cell nuclear size to diagnose malignant states in ex-vivo tissue samples [12].…”

On‐the‐fly detection of changes on and below the surface in epithelium mucosal tissue architecture from scattered light

“…While those techniques use florescent dyes to interrogate subsurface information, other researchers are focusing on extracting information from tissue layers at different depths using reflected light [16][17][18][19][20][21] without the use of dyes. Recent studies also involve coherence based depth resolved techniques such as OCT [22][23][24][25].…”