Automated identification of basal cell carcinoma by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

We report an automated classifier to detect the presence of basal cell carcinoma in images of mouse skin tissue samples acquired by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). The sensitivity and specificity of the classifier based on combined information of the scattering intensity and birefringence properties of the samples are significantly higher than when intensity or birefringence information are used alone. The combined information offers a sensitivity of 94.4% and specificity of 92.5%, compared to 78.2% and 82.2% for intensity-only information and 85.5% and 87.9% for birefringence-only information. These results demonstrate that analysis of the combination of complementary optical information obtained by PS-OCT has great potential for accurate skin cancer diagnosis.