Design and implementation of an integrated scanning protocol for multimodal functional OCT

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Optics
• Dermatology
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Early diagnosis of skin lesions is critical for effective treatment.
• Non-invasive techniques like optical coherence tomography (OCT) are valuable for skin assessment.
• Integrating OCT structural imaging, optical coherence elastography (OCE), and OCT-based angiography (OCTA) presents challenges due to image registration difficulties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a novel scanning protocol for simultaneous OCT, OCE, and OCTA acquisition.
• To enable comprehensive, non-invasive characterization of skin tissue properties and vascular networks.
• To facilitate more accurate differentiation between benign and malignant skin lesions.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a swept-source OCT (SS-OCT) system to integrate structural imaging, OCE, and OCTA in a single scanning session.
• Recruited eleven healthy participants, acquiring data from palm, forearm, and facial skin.
• Calculated biomechanical parameters (Young's modulus) from OCE and vascular network metrics (VAD, VSD, VDI, WTI) from OCTA.

Main Results:

• Successfully acquired integrated OCT, OCE, and OCTA data from healthy human skin.
• Demonstrated distinct biomechanical and vascular parameters between healthy facial skin and one collected facial lesion dataset.
• The new protocol allows for calculation of key skin parameters from a single scan acquisition.

Conclusions:

• The integrated scanning protocol offers a comprehensive, non-invasive approach to skin assessment.
• This method provides valuable data for dermatologists, aiding in skin disease research and diagnosis.
• Potential benefits include improved differentiation of skin lesions and enhanced understanding of skin pathophysiology.