Department of Medical Imaging, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Cancer Center, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, SAR, China.
Anat Rec (Hoboken). 2020 Dec;303(12):3108-3116. doi: 10.1002/ar.24340. Epub 2019 Dec 24.
Scleroderma (SD) is a rare and agnogenic autoimmune disease whose progression can be modified by medical or surgical intervention if detected early. Multimodality imaging makes early detection of SD possible based on the structural and functional findings from different imaging methods. Combining optical coherence tomography (OCT) with magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and Doppler ultrasonography (DUS) to identify the typical structural and functional features that can exhibit significant differences between SD patients and healthy controls. In this study, six participants (three healthy volunteers and three SD patients) were recruited and clinically examined by a rheumatologist. Participants' fingers were scanned by MRA, DUS, and OCT, respectively. MRA and DSU imaging results showed that SD patients exhibited thicker finger skin, a loss of blood vessels, and lower blood flow, whereas OCT captured the high-resolution morphology changes of the skin, epidermal, dermis, and subcutaneous layers, demonstrating a distinct loss of the dermo-epidermal junction in SD patients. Multimodal imaging techniques offer a more comprehensive characterization of the morphological and functional information of biological tissues, which can assist physicians to achieve a more accurate SD diagnosis.
硬皮病（SD）是一种罕见的、原因不明的自身免疫性疾病，如果早期发现，可以通过医疗或手术干预来改变其进展。多模态成像可以根据不同成像方法的结构和功能发现来实现 SD 的早期检测。将光学相干断层扫描（OCT）与磁共振血管造影（MRA）和多普勒超声（DUS）相结合，以识别 SD 患者和健康对照者之间可能存在显著差异的典型结构和功能特征。在这项研究中，招募了六名参与者（三名健康志愿者和三名 SD 患者），并由风湿病学家进行了临床检查。参与者的手指分别接受了 MRA、DUS 和 OCT 扫描。MRA 和 DSU 成像结果表明，SD 患者的手指皮肤更厚，血管减少，血流减少，而 OCT 则捕捉到皮肤、表皮、真皮和皮下层的高分辨率形态变化，显示 SD 患者的表皮-真皮交界处明显缺失。多模态成像技术提供了对生物组织形态和功能信息的更全面描述，可以帮助医生更准确地诊断 SD。
