Integrated optical coherence tomography and optical coherence microscopy imaging of human pathology

Excisional biopsy is the current gold standard for disease diagnosis; however, it requires a relatively long processing time and it may also suffer from unacceptable false negative rates due to sampling errors. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a promising imaging technique that provide real-time, high resolution and three-dimensional (3D) images of tissue morphology. Optical coherence microscopy (OCM) is an extension of OCT, combining both the coherence gating and the confocal gating techniques. OCM imaging achieves cellular resolution with deeper imaging depth compared to confocal microscopy. An integrated OCT/OCM imaging system can provide co-registered multiscale imaging of tissue morphology. 3D-OCT provides architectural information with a large field of view and can be used to find regions of interest; while OCM provides high magnification to enable cellular imaging. The integrated OCT/OCM system has an axial resolution of <4um and transverse resolutions of 14um and <2um for OCT and OCM, respectively. In this study, a wide range of human pathologic specimens, including colon (58), thyroid (43), breast (34), and kidney (19), were imaged with OCT and OCM within 2 to 6 hours after excision. The images were compared with H & E histology to identify characteristic features useful for disease diagnosis. The feasibility of visualizing human pathology using integrated OCT/OCM was demonstrated in the pathology laboratory settings.