Optical coherence tomography for thyroid pathology: 3D analysis of tissue microstructure

Iulian Emil Tampu; Michaela Maintz; Daniela Koller; Kenth Johansson; Oliver Gimm; Arrigo Capitanio; Anders Eklund; Neda Haj-Hosseini

doi:10.1364/BOE.394296

Optical coherence tomography for thyroid pathology: 3D analysis of tissue microstructure

Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Jul 9;11(8):4130-4149. doi: 10.1364/BOE.394296. eCollection 2020 Aug 1.

Authors

Iulian Emil Tampu¹, Michaela Maintz¹, Daniela Koller¹, Kenth Johansson², Oliver Gimm³, Arrigo Capitanio⁴, Anders Eklund^{1

5

6}, Neda Haj-Hosseini¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping 581 85, Sweden.
² Department of Surgery, Västervik Hospital and Örebro University Hospital, Västervik and Örebro, Sweden.
³ Department of Surgery, and Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Linköping University Hospital and Linköping University, Linköping 581 85, Sweden.
⁴ Department of Clinical Pathology, and Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Linköping University, Linköping 581 85, Sweden.
⁵ Division of Statistics & Machine Learning, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping 581 83, Sweden.
⁶ Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization, Linköping University, Linköping 581 85, Sweden.

Abstract

To investigate the potential of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to distinguish between normal and pathologic thyroid tissue, 3D OCT images were acquired on ex vivo thyroid samples from adult subjects (n=22) diagnosed with a variety of pathologies. The follicular structure was analyzed in terms of count, size, density and sphericity. Results showed that OCT images highly agreed with the corresponding histopatology and the calculated parameters were representative of the follicular structure variation. The analysis of OCT volumes provides quantitative information that could make automatic classification possible. Thus, OCT can be beneficial for intraoperative surgical guidance or in the pathology assessment routine.