Review of optical coherence tomography in oncology

Abstract

The application of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in the field of oncology has been prospering over the past decade. OCT imaging has been used to image a broad spectrum of malignancies, including those arising in the breast, brain, bladder, the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and reproductive tracts, the skin, and oral cavity, among others. OCT imaging has initially been applied for guiding biopsies, for intraoperatively evaluating tumor margins and lymph nodes, and for the early detection of small lesions that would often not be visible on gross examination, tasks that align well with the clinical emphasis on early detection and intervention. Recently, OCT imaging has been explored for imaging tumor cells and their dynamics, and for the monitoring of tumor responses to treatments. This paper reviews the evolution of OCT technologies for the clinical application of OCT in surgical and noninvasive interventional oncology procedures and concludes with a discussion of the future directions for OCT technologies, with particular emphasis on their applications in oncology.

Thyroid Tumor Capsular Invasion: the Bottom Line or Much Ado About Nothing?

“…In fact, the only way to make an accurate diagnosis of a non-invasive neoplasm would be to examine every serial section of every piece of tumor capsule at the cost of exhausting the tissue. This would be considered absurd but may in fact become possible as we learn to apply novel imaging technologies that can see through full blocks of tissue [3]. In the interim, we must balance the risk by identifying areas of suspicion and recognizing that we have a responsibility to cut multiple deeper sections to ensure that we have not missed a focus of true invasion.…”

Ten Years of Gabor-Domain Optical Coherence Microscopy

“…Originally developed for ophthalmic applications to image the posterior segment of the eye [3,[33][34][35] and further enhanced with OCT angiography [36,37], OCT has found successful applications in the anterior segment of the eye [30], as well as in a number of fields, including dermatology [38,39], oncology [40][41][42][43][44][45][46] and dentistry [47]; in endoscopic form it has been applied to cardiology [48,49], gastroenterology [50,51], and pulmonology [52][53][54]. Numerous embodiments of functional OCT [55], including Doppler OCT and polarization-sensitive OCT [56,57], as well as optical coherence elastography [58][59][60][61][62][63][64], multimodal fluorescence-OCT [2,[65][66][67] and spectroscopic OCT [68], have been developed to enhance the structural information obtained with OCT with properties related to tissue function.…”

Advanced imaging technology applications in cytology

“…Numerous ex vivo and in situ studies have reported that OCT is able to readily differentiate normal microstructure from neoplasia in several tissues (e.g., cervix, breast, thyroid, bladder, colon polyps, etc.). [6][7][8][9] High-speed OCT offers a novel method for real-time intraoperative evaluation of surgical margins. Whilst OCT is highly sensitive in identifying preinvasive and invasive cancer of the uterine cervix, 10 it…”