Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 40 Blossom Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02114, USA.
Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 50 Blossom Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02114, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 13;10(1):2561. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-59330-7.
The clinical assessment of fibrosis is critical to the diagnosis and management of patients with systemic sclerosis. Current clinical standards for patient assessment is to use skin fibrosis as an indicator of organ involvement, though this approach is highly subjective and relies on manual palpation. The development of a new method for accurately quantifying collagen content may therefore significantly improve the accuracy of the traditional skin score in patients with systemic sclerosis and may additionally aid in the monitoring of anti-fibrotic therapies in clinical practice. Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is a high-speed volumetric imaging modality that can be used to assess birefringent tissues including collagen. In this work we demonstrate a novel computational approach using PS-OCT for the assessment of fibrosis. This approach, based on the measured distribution of optic axis values associated with a given volume of collagen orientation, characterizes fibrotic changes independently from the depth of the region of interest in the tissue. This approach has the potential to accurately quantify collagen content and orientation faster and more robustly compared to traditional PS-OCT metrics. We investigate the viability of this approach for assessing the development of fibrosis in a bleomycin induced skin fibrosis mouse model.
纤维化的临床评估对系统性硬化症患者的诊断和治疗至关重要。目前，评估患者的临床标准是将皮肤纤维化作为器官受累的指标，但这种方法具有高度主观性，依赖于手动触诊。因此，开发一种新的方法来准确量化胶原含量可能会显著提高系统性硬化症患者传统皮肤评分的准确性，并可能有助于在临床实践中监测抗纤维化治疗。偏光敏感光学相干断层扫描（PS-OCT）是一种高速容积成像方式，可用于评估双折射组织，包括胶原。在这项工作中，我们展示了一种使用 PS-OCT 评估纤维化的新计算方法。该方法基于与给定体积胶原取向相关的光轴值的测量分布，独立于组织中感兴趣区域的深度来描述纤维化变化。与传统 PS-OCT 指标相比，这种方法具有更快、更稳健地准确量化胶原含量和取向的潜力。我们研究了这种方法在评估博来霉素诱导的皮肤纤维化小鼠模型中纤维化发展的可行性。
