Imaging striae distensae: a comparison between PS-OCT and digital dermoscopy

Stretch marks or striae distensae (SD) cause emotional distress and negatively affect the psychological well-being of patients. We investigate and compare two methods for quantifying the severity of SD: visual scoring of images captured using a clinical visible-light dermatological camera (C-Cube, Pixience Inc) and measuring the local birefringence of skin using polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). Data on skin visually affected by SD and visually normal skin were collected from 19 human volunteers. Our results show a weak correlation between visual scores of the C-Cube images and the birefringence values obtained from the PS-OCT system. SD datasets have a significantly larger birefringence values compared to visually normal datasets.