Detecting human articular cartilage degeneration in its early stage with polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Xin Zhou; Felipe Eltit; Xiao Yang; Sina Maloufi; Hanadi Alousaimi; Qihao Liu; Lin Huang; Rizhi Wang; Shuo Tang

doi:10.1364/BOE.387242

Detecting human articular cartilage degeneration in its early stage with polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Apr 27;11(5):2745-2760. doi: 10.1364/BOE.387242. eCollection 2020 May 1.

Authors

Xin Zhou¹, Felipe Eltit^{2

3}, Xiao Yang^{4

5}, Sina Maloufi⁶, Hanadi Alousaimi^{2

3}, Qihao Liu¹, Lin Huang¹, Rizhi Wang^{2

3

7}, Shuo Tang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6 T 1Z4, Canada.
² Centre for Hip Health and Mobility, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
³ School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
⁴ Huaxi MR Research Center, Department of Radiology, West China Hospital and West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China.
⁵ College of Polymer Science and Engineering, State Key laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.
⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6 T 1Z4, Canada.
⁷ Department of Materials Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.

Abstract

Detecting articular cartilage (AC) degeneration in its early stage plays a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment of osteoarthritis (OA). Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is sensitive to the alteration and disruption of collagen organization that happens during OA progression. This study proposes an effective OA evaluating method based on PS-OCT imaging. A slope-based analysis is applied on the phase retardation images to segment articular cartilage into three zones along the depth direction. The boundaries and birefringence coefficients (BRCs) of each zone are quantified. Two parameters, namely phase homogeneity index (PHI) and zonal distinguishability (Dz), are further developed to quantify the fluctuation within each zone and the zone-to-zone variation of the tissue birefringence properties. The PS-OCT based evaluating method then combines PHI and Dz to provide a G _PS score for the severity of OA. The proposed method is applied to human hip joint samples and the results are compared with the grading by histology images. The G _PS score shows very strong statistical significance in differentiating different stages of OA. Compared to using the BRC of each zone or a single BRC for the entire depth, the G _PS score shows great improvement in differentiating early-stage OA. The proposed method is shown to have great potential to be developed as a clinical tool for detecting OA.