Skin cancers including carcinomas and melanomas are currently the most common cancers in fair skinned humans. Histopathology, requiring invasive tissue biopsy and processing, is the gold standard for cancer diagnosis. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has emerged as a label-free, non-traumatic and non-invasive method that can be used in vivo to image skin tissues (from stratum corneum to dermis) and therefore contribute to skin cancer diagnosis. Some of the major limitations of OCT imaging techniques are a lower resolution compared to histology and a limited penetration depth due to skin tissues’ strong optical scattering. Optical clearing has been investigated for several years as one of the solutions to overcome these problems by inducing a reversible decreased scattering and thus allowing a better contrast and an improved light penetration depth within biological tissues. Clearing is achieved using optical clearing agents (OCA) combined with chemical enhancers (used to better pass through the stratum corneum layer). As a first step, the current study aims at defining the quantitative features (intensity profile, image statistics, texture descriptors) that are best suited to quantify optical clarification kinetics from images acquired using Linefield Confocal-OCT (LC-OCT) device. This will help analyzing the relationship between visible optical clearing and OCT devices resolution.
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