Imaging intracellular motion with dynamic micro-optical coherence tomography

Hui Min Leung; Michelle L Wang; Hany Osman; Elham Abouei; Calum MacAulay; Michele Follen; Joseph A Gardecki; Guillermo J Tearney

doi:10.1364/BOE.390782

Imaging intracellular motion with dynamic micro-optical coherence tomography

Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Apr 28;11(5):2768-2778. doi: 10.1364/BOE.390782. eCollection 2020 May 1.

Authors

Hui Min Leung^{1

2}, Michelle L Wang^{1

3}, Hany Osman^{1

2}, Elham Abouei^{4

5}, Calum MacAulay⁵, Michele Follen⁶, Joseph A Gardecki^{1

2}, Guillermo J Tearney^{1

2

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
² Harvard Medical School, 25 Shattuck St, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
³ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
⁴ University of British Columbia, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vancouver, BC V6 T 1Z1, Canada.
⁵ British Columbia Cancer Research Center, Department of Integrative Oncology, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1L3, Canada.
⁶ NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County, Cancer Prevention and Cancer Services for Kings County Hospital, 451 Clarkson Avenue, C-Building, Suite 4104, Brooklyn, NY 11203, USA.
⁷ Harvard-MIT Division of Heath Sciences and Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁸ Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.

Abstract

This paper describes a new technology that uses 1-µm-resolution optical coherence tomography (µOCT) to obtain cross-sectional images of intracellular dynamics with dramatically enhanced image contrast. This so-called dynamic µOCT (d-µOCT) is accomplished by acquiring a time series of µOCT images and conducting power frequency analysis of the temporal fluctuations that arise from intracellular motion on a pixel-per-pixel basis. Here, we demonstrate d-µOCT imaging of freshly excised human esophageal and cervical biopsy samples. Depth-resolved d-µOCT images of intact tissue show that intracellular dynamics provides a new contrast mechanism for µOCT that highlights subcellular morphology and activity in epithelial surface maturation patterns.

Grants and funding

R25 DK103579/DK/NIDDK NIH HHS/United States