Optical Coherence Tomography for Quantitative Diagnosis in Nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Abstract

We tried to quantitative diagnosis the intrinsic differences in the optical properties of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) from normal tissue by OCT. The scattering coefficients and anisotropies are extracted by fitting the average a-scan attenuation curves based on the multiple scatter effect. The median scattering coefficients of epithelium are 2.2 mm−1 (IQR 1.5 to 2.5 mm−1) for normal versus 3.8 mm−1 (IQR 2.0 to 3.3 mm−1) for cancer tissue; of lamina propria are 2.9 mm−1 (IQR 1.5 to 2.5 mm−1) for normal versus 1.3 mm−1 (IQR 1.2 to 12 mm−1) for cancer tissue; and anisotropy factors of epithelium are 0.91 (IQR 0.9 to 0.93) versus 0.91 (IQR 0.88 to 0.97) for normal and cancer tissue; of lamina propria are 0.98 (IQR 0.94 to 0.99) for normal versus 0.98 (IQR 0.96 to 0.99) for cancer, respectively. The results show quantitative values of scattering coefficients combing with the morphological by OCT can improve the diagnosis rate of NPC.