Intraoperative characterization of cardiac tissue: the potential of light scattering spectroscopy

Damage to the cardiac conduction system remains one of the most significant risks associated with surgical interventions to correct congenital heart disease. This work demonstrates how light-scattering spectroscopy (LSS) can be used to non-destructively characterize cardiac tissue regions.

To present an approach for associating tissue composition information with location-specific LSS data and further evaluate an LSS and machine learning system as a method for non-destructive tissue characterization.

A custom LSS probe was used to gather spectral data from locations across 14 excised human pediatric nodal tissue samples (8 sinus nodes, 6 atrioventricular nodes). The LSS spectra were used to train linear and neural-network-based regressor models to predict tissue composition characteristics derived from the 3D models.

Nodal tissue region nuclear densities were reported. A linear model trained to regress nuclear density from spectra achieved a prediction r-squared of 0.64 and a concordance correlation coefficient of 0.78.

These methods build on previous studies suggesting that LSS measurements combined with machine learning signal processing can provide clinically relevant cardiac tissue composition.