Multimodal Optical Imaging Combined with Radiomic Analysis for Fibrotic Cardiac Tissue Investigation.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Cardiovascular Research
• Optical Imaging

Background:

• Cardiac fibrosis, or fibrotic scarring of the myocardium, is critical for diagnosing and stratifying risk in life-threatening cardiac dysfunction.
• Fibrogenesis involves complex changes in myocardial structure, composition, and conductivity, altering tissue characteristics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a multimodal optical imaging approach for multiparametric assessment of the myocardium.
• To link electrophysiologic, morphologic, functional, and molecular changes in ischemic cardiac tissue using radiomic analysis.
• To validate findings with histology.

Main Methods:

• Cardiac optical mapping (COM) for electrical behavior assessment.
• Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) for imaging collagen, extracellular matrix, and cardiomyocytes.
• Line scan Raman microspectroscopy (LSRM) for molecular contrast and fibrotic scarring stage evaluation.
• Optical coherence tomography (OCT) for navigation and intermodal referencing.

Main Results:

• A machine learning model using radiomic features from MPM achieved 0.99 accuracy in classifying healthy versus pathologic cardiac tissues.
• LSRM achieved 0.94 sensitivity and specificity for evaluating fibrotic scarring development and multiclass classification.
• The multimodal approach enabled coregistration across various fields of view and resolutions.

Conclusions:

• Multimodal optical imaging combined with radiomic analysis provides a comprehensive assessment of cardiac tissue.
• This approach facilitates automated, high-throughput classification of cardiac tissue health and fibrotic stage.
• The integrated imaging techniques offer valuable insights into the complex changes associated with cardiac fibrosis.