Abstract
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging 3D imaging technique that allows quantification of intrinsic optical properties such as scattering coefficient and back-scattering coefficient, and has proved useful in distinguishing delicate microstructures in the human brain. The origins of scattering in brain tissues are contributed by the myelin content, neuron size and density primarily; however, no quantitative relationships between them have been reported, which hampers the use of OCT in fundamental studies of architectonic areas in the human brain and the pathological evaluations of diseases. Here, we built a generalized linear model based on Mie scattering theory that quantitatively links tissue scattering to myelin content and neuron density in the human brain. We report a strong linear relationship between scattering coefficient and the myelin content that is retained across different regions of the brain. Neuronal cell body turns out to be a secondary contribution to the overall scattering. The optical property of OCT provides a label-free solution for quantifying volumetric myelin content and neuron cells in the human brain.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging 3D imaging technique that allows quantification of intrinsic optical properties such as scattering coefficient and back-scattering coefficient, and has proved useful in distinguishing delicate microstructures in the human brain
Our study provides a novel method for measuring myelin content and neuron density of the human brain tissues in a scalable sample size
Our results suggest that in addition to histology, the optical property obtained by OCT serves as a viable tool to differentiate the neocortex from the allocortex, with a distinction resulting from underlying myelin content
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging 3D imaging technique that allows quantification of intrinsic optical properties such as scattering coefficient and back-scattering coefficient, and has proved useful in distinguishing delicate microstructures in the human brain. Despite significant advances in imaging technology in the past decades, our understanding of human brain structures at 1–100 μm scale, in which neurons are organized into functional cohorts, is still limited Quantitative features such as cell and myelin density have only been reported in a small number of subjects and over a small region of the b rain[4,5,6,7,8,9]. Srinivasan et al.[19] found that myelinated fiber tracts are highly scattering while cell bodies have a lower scattering coefficient Despite these investigations, quantitative correlations between tissue optical properties and these structural components have yet to be investigated. As demyelination and neuron loss are two of the pathological hallmarks in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)[23,24,25,26,27,28], characterization of the optical property in diseased and normal brains will advance our understanding of pathological evolutions and their impact on complex functions
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