Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 26, 2025
Tracking the Mammary Architectural Features and Detecting Breast Cancer with Magnetic Resonance Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Published on: December 15, 2014
Compression OCT-elastography combined with speckle-contrast analysis as an approach to the morphological assessment
Anton A Plekhanov1, Ekaterina V Gubarkova1, Marina A Sirotkina1
1Institute of Experimental Oncology and Biomedical Technologies, Privolzhsky Research Medical University, Minin and Pozharsky sq. 10/1, 603950 Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Abstract:
Currently, optical biopsy technologies are being developed for rapid and label-free visualization of biological tissue with micrometer-level resolution. They can play an important role in breast-conserving surgery guidance, detection of residual cancer cells, and targeted histological analysis. For solving these problems, compression optical coherence elastography (C-OCE) demonstrated impressive results based on differences in the elasticity of different tissue constituents. However, sometimes straightforward C-OCE-based differentiation is insufficient because of the similar stiffness of certain tissue components. We present a new automated approach to the rapid morphological assessment of human breast cancer based on the combined usage of C-OCE and speckle-contrast (SC) analysis. Using the SC analysis of structural OCT images, the threshold value of the SC coefficient was established to enable the separation of areas of adipose cells from necrotic cancer cells, even if they are highly similar in elastic properties. Consequently, the boundaries of the tumor bed can be reliably identified. The joint analysis of structural and elastographic images enables automated morphological segmentation based on the characteristic ranges of stiffness (Young's modulus) and SC coefficient established for four morphological structures of breast-cancer samples from patients post neoadjuvant chemotherapy (residual cancer cells, cancer stroma, necrotic cancer cells, and mammary adipose cells). This enabled precise automated detection of residual cancer-cell zones within the tumor bed for grading cancer response to chemotherapy. The results of C-OCE/SC morphometry highly correlated with the histology-based results (r =0.96-0.98). The combined C-OCE/SC approach has the potential to be used intraoperatively for achieving clean resection margins in breast cancer surgery and for performing targeted histological analysis of samples, including the evaluation of the efficacy of cancer chemotherapy.
