Abstract
The cutaneous vasculature is involved in many diseases. Current clinical examination techniques, however, cannot resolve the human vasculature with all plexus in a non-invasive manner. By combining an optical coherence tomography system with angiography extension and an all optical photoacoustic tomography system, we can resolve in 3D the blood vessels in human skin for all plexus non-invasively. With a customized imaging unit that permits access to various parts of patients’ bodies, we applied our multimodality imaging system to investigate several different types of skin conditions. Quantitative vascular analysis is given for each of the dermatological conditions to show the potential diagnostic value of our system in non-invasive examination of diseases and physiological processes. Improved performance of our system over its previous generation is also demonstrated with an updated characterization.
Highlights
The cutaneous vasculature is involved in many diseases
After a phase stable swept source was successfully employed in an optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) system for human skin imaging[31], we demonstrated in a previous work that the same region imaged by OCTA and Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) can be co-registered using a transition zone in which both modalities visualize the same blood vessels in human skin[9]
We introduce for the first time an upgraded optical coherence tomography (OCT)/OCTA/PAT system, whose components are all assembled into a mobile cart
Summary
The cutaneous vasculature is involved in many diseases. Current clinical examination techniques, cannot resolve the human vasculature with all plexus in a non-invasive manner. By combining an optical coherence tomography system with angiography extension and an all optical photoacoustic tomography system, we can resolve in 3D the blood vessels in human skin for all plexus non-invasively. Its disadvantages are that it is invasive, and the reconstruction process is time consuming Alternative approaches such as magnetic resonance imaging can visualize major human skin blood vessels[14], but they do not have the fine resolution to reveal the complete cutaneous vasculature from capillary loops to deep dermal plexus. After a phase stable swept source was successfully employed in an OCTA system for human skin imaging[31], we demonstrated in a previous work that the same region imaged by OCTA and PAT can be co-registered using a transition zone in which both modalities visualize the same blood vessels in human skin[9]. Based on previously reported vessel quantification methods for OCTA32–34 and PAT35, we provide quantitative analysis of the vasculature for these conditions, including vascular morphological and tortuosity parameters such as the vascular density (VD), inflection count metric (ICM) and sum of angles metric (SOAM), etc., using a skeletonization blood vessel quantification algorithm[35]
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