OCT-based label-free in vivo lymphangiography within human skin and areola

Abstract

Due to the limitations of current imaging techniques, visualization of lymphatic capillaries within tissue in vivo has been challenging. Here, we present a label-free high resolution optical coherence tomography (OCT) based lymphangiography (OLAG) within human skin in vivo. OLAG enables rapid (~seconds) mapping of lymphatic networks, along with blood vessel networks, over 8 mm x 8 mm of human skin and 5 mm x 5 mm of human areola. Moreover, lymphatic system’s response to inflammation within human skin is monitored throughout an acne lesion development over 7 days. The demonstrated results promise OLAG as a revolutionary tool in the clinical research and treatment of patients with pathologic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.

In vivo label-free lymphangiography of cutaneous lymphatic vessels in human burn scars using optical coherence tomography

“…In this study, we present a method to segment the lymphatic vessels by thresholding the attenuationcompensated signal using the single-scattering model, aided by the correction of the confocal function of the focusing optics and sensitivity fall-off of the OCT scanner. In contrast, the method in [17] compensates the attenuation at each pixel as a function of the summed intensities of all pixels within the A-scan located at greater depths, which has been shown to be advantageous for heterogeneous tissue, but lacks a mechanism to account for the confocal function and sensitivity fall-off. Whilst sensitivity and spatial resolution of the OCT scanner will limit the ability to detect very small lymphatic vessels, our approach utilizes consistent threshold values across all data sets, reducing variation between measurements in a longitudinal setting.…”

“…Methods, including ours, for segmenting lymphatic vessels from OCT scans largely rely on the low signal in vessel lumens due to their transparency [7,[15][16][17]. When applied to various biological tissues, the reliability of this group of methods might be impacted by other structures with low backscattering.…”

“…Such approaches can be problematic at the intersection of vessels or in regions with multiple vessels within the computation window, where the assumptions of the local shape are no longer valid. While these methods have been primarily demonstrated on animal models, Baran et al recently presented the first demonstration on human skin [17].…”

Optical coherence tomography based microangiography provides an ability to longitudinally image arteriogenesis in vivo

“…This technique has been applied to the longitudinal study of microcirculation changes during wound healing in the mouse ear pinna (Wang, et al, 2014), and to the in vivo examination of mouse cerebral vasodynamics in response to ischemic stroke (Jia, et al, 2011) (Baran, et al, 2015). Moreover, the recently developed OCT-based lymphangiography (OLAG) has successfully been applied to produce lymphangiograms of post-depilation mouse ears (Qin, et al, 2015), and within human skin and areola (Baran, et al, 2016). …”

Depth-resolved 3D visualization of coronary microvasculature with optical microangiography

“…Amongst successful OCT based microvascular imaging techniques, Optical microangiography (OMAG), first demonstrated in 2007 (Wang et al , 2007), has been extensively applied to study dynamic microcirculation in various animal models (Wang and Hurst, 2007; Zhi et al , 2011a; Marcu et al , 2015; Qin et al , 2015b) as well as in human skin (An et al , 2010; Baran et al , 2016) and the human eye (An and Wang, 2008; Wang et al , 2010). Many other derivatives of OCT-based angiography technologies have also been developed subsequently and provided advantages for clinic purposes, e.g., low cost, fast acquisition, high resolution, noninvasive and depth-resolved imaging ability (Zhang et al , 2015).…”