Correction of Autofluorescence Intensity for Epithelial Scattering by Optical Coherence Tomography - A Phantom Study

摘要

In this paper, we conduct a phantom study for modeling the autofluorescence (AF) properties of tissue. A combined optical coherence tomography (OCT) and AF imaging system is proposed to measure the strength of the AF signal in terms of the scattering layer thickness and concentration. The combined AF-OCT system is capable of estimating the AF loss due to scattering in the epithelium using the thickness and scattering concentration calculated from the co-registered OCT images. We define a correction factor to account for scattering losses in the epithelium and calculate a scattering-corrected AF signal. We believe the scattering-corrected AF will reduce the diagnostic false-positives rate in the early detection of airway lesions due to confounding factors such as increased epithelial thickness and inflammations.