Paper published on Master/Slave OCT and BCC imaging

Catherine Chin

Master/slave optical coherence tomography imaging of eyelid basal cell carcinoma

Authors: Catherine Chin, Adrian Bradu, Rongxuan Lim, Mona Khandwala, John Schofield, Lasse Leick, and Adrian Podoleanu

Journal: Applied Optics Vol. 55, Issue 26, pp. 7378-7386 (2016) Link to article

Published: September 10th, 2016

Also featured on OCTnews.org

Featured on the cover of Issue 26, Applied optics 2016

Abstract:

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is fast emerging as an additional non-interventional modality for skin tumor detection and diagnosis. A master/slave flying spot OCT configuration was assembled to detect periocular basal cell carcinomas (BCC). A swept source at 1300 nm and sweeping speed of 50 kHz were used. A three-step process was involved. First, 384 channeled spectra using a mirror were stored for 384 optical path differences at the master stage. Then, the stored channeled spectra (masks) were correlated with the channeled spectrum from the BCC tissue to produce 384 en face OCT images (200×200 pixels) for the optical path difference values used to acquire the masks. Finally, these en face slices were stacked to form a volume to cross-reference BCC tumor margins in the orthogonal plane. Per each eyelid sample, several en face images of 200×200 lateral pixels are produced in the time to scan laterally a complete raster of 1.6 s. Combination of the en face views with the cross-sectioning views allow for better discrimination of BCCs comparable to using cross-sectional imaging alone, as previously reported using the conventional fast-Fourier-transform-based OCT techniques.

For full article, go to OSA Publishing website

Featured image of en-face OCT scan depicting clear indication of BCC tissue in dark spots. 

Master/slave OCT is a technical invention of Applied Optics Group at the University of Kent. Prof Adrian Podoleanu and Dr Adrian Bradu are the inventors of this new imaging technique.

This project was carried out in collaboration with R. Lim, M. Khandwala and J. Schofield of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust Hospital.

For more information on this paper, please contact the author Catherine at cc539 ‘at’ kent.ac.uk