Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.
Health Sciences Research, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.
J Biophotonics. 2021 Mar;14(3):e202000364. doi: 10.1002/jbio.202000364. Epub 2020 Dec 17.
Embolectomy is one of the emergency procedures performed to remove emboli. Assessing the composition of human blood clots is an important diagnostic factor and could provide guidance for an appropriate treatment strategy for interventional physicians. Immunostaining has been used to identity compositions of clots as a gold-standard procedure, but it is time-consuming and cannot be performed in situ. Here, we proposed that the optical attenuation coefficient of optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be a reliable indicator as a new imaging modality to differentiate clot compositions. Fifteen human blood clots with multiple red blood cell (RBC) compositions from 21% to 95% were prepared using healthy human whole blood. A homogeneous gelatin phantom experiment and numerical simulation based on the Lambert-Beer's law were examined to verify the validity of the attenuation coefficient estimation. The results displayed that optical attenuation coefficients were strongly correlated with RBC compositions. We reported that attenuation coefficients could be a promising biomarker to guide the choice of an appropriate interventional device in a clinical setting and assist in characterizing blood clots.
取栓术是用于清除栓子的一种急救程序。评估人体血栓的成分是一个重要的诊断因素，并可为介入医生提供适当的治疗策略指导。免疫染色已被用于鉴定血栓的成分，是一种金标准的方法，但它耗时且不能在现场进行。在这里，我们提出光学相干断层扫描（OCT）的光衰减系数可以作为一种新的成像方式，成为区分血栓成分的可靠指标。使用健康人的全血制备了 15 个人类血栓，其红细胞（RBC）组成从 21%到 95%不等。通过均匀明胶体模实验和基于朗伯-比尔定律的数值模拟来验证衰减系数估计的有效性。结果表明，光衰减系数与 RBC 组成具有很强的相关性。我们报告说，衰减系数可能是一种很有前途的生物标志物，可以指导在临床环境中选择合适的介入设备，并有助于对血栓进行特征描述。
