Nanoscale structure detection and monitoring of tumour growth with optical coherence tomography

TL;DR

This paper introduces nanosensitive optical coherence tomography (nsOCT), a novel imaging technique capable of detecting and monitoring nanoscale tissue ultrastructural changes associated with tumor growth, improving early cancer diagnosis.

Contribution

The paper presents a new nsOCT method that achieves nanometre-scale detection of tissue structures, surpassing existing imaging modalities in resolution and depth sensitivity.

Findings

Successfully detected synthetic axial structures via simulations

Experimentally validated detection of known nanoscale structures

Revealed ultrastructural changes related to carcinoma at different tissue depths

Abstract

Approximately 90% of cancers have their origins in epithelial tissues and this leads to epithelial thickening, but the ultrastructural changes and underlying architecture is less well known. Depth resolved label free visualization of nanoscale tissue morphology is required to reveal the extent and distribution of ultrastructural changes in underlying tissue, but is difficult to achieve with existing imaging modalities. We developed a nanosensitive optical coherence tomography (nsOCT) approach to provide such imaging based on dominant axial structure with a few nanometre detection accuracy. nsOCT maps the distribution of axial structural sizes an order of magnitude smaller than the axial resolution of the system. We validated nsOCT methodology by detecting synthetic axial structure via numerical simulations. Subsequently, we validated the nsOCT technique experimentally by detecting known structures from a commercially fabricated sample. nsOCT reveals scaling with different depth of dominant submicron structural changes associated with carcinoma which may inform the origins of the disease, its progression and improve diagnosis.