Abstract
An optical coherence tomography (OCT) microvascular imaging platform, consisting of Doppler (DOCT) and speckle variance (svOCT) modalities, and microvascular image quantification tools are developed. The quantification methods extract blood flow-related parameters from DOCT images and vessel morphological parameters from svOCT images. This platform is used to assess the microvascular (DOCT and svOCT) images obtained during a clinical study on late oral radiation toxicity. This specific pathology was considered a suitable scenario for verifying the performance of the developed quantification platform because late oral radiation toxicity is known to involve microvascular damage. The derived parameters are compared between several DOCT and svOCT images from one patient and one healthy volunteer as proof-of-principle, and the significance of the observed differences is discussed. Given the low number of OCT clinical studies that measure and quantify microvascular images and considering the importance of such quantification in a number of pathologies, this newly developed platform can serve as a useful tool in studying diseases and treatments with microvascular involvement.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a micron-scaleresolution imaging modality that can capture subsurface structural images within 1 to 2 mm below the surface of most biological tissues.[1]
We have developed a quantification tool to extract certain metrics from the acquired Doppler OCT (DOCT) and speckle variance OCT (svOCT) images as an objective method to assess the microvascular abnormalities in oral pathologies
The developed metrics were extracted from DOCT and svOCT images acquired from one late oral radiation toxicity patient and one healthy volunteer
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a micron-scaleresolution imaging modality that can capture subsurface structural images within 1 to 2 mm below the surface of most biological tissues.[1] Since its emergence in the 1990s,2 it has been actively researched by the biophotonics and medical imaging communities,[3,4,5] with significant technological advances in various preclinical and clinical studies.[5,6] OCT images of tissue microstructure can be supplemented by those of microvasculature[7,8] to add important physiological and functional information to clinical imaging. While microvascular OCT imaging is of interest due to the additional functional information it provides, it is not often performed in clinical studies because of technological challenges, including system issues such as phase noise, or challenges associated with tissue motion.[9,11] For example, among the ∼400 Among the OCT microvascular imaging methods, Doppler OCT (DOCT) has captured a lot of attention due to its ability to provide information on blood velocity as slow as tens of micrometers per second.[9,10] speckle variance OCT (svOCT)[11] is another OCTbased microvascular imaging technique that can visualize microvessels as small as tens of micrometers in diameter.[11]
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