In vivo evaluation of human skin anisotropy by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Abstract

We performed an in vivo three-dimensional analysis of anisotropic changes in the dermal birefringence of mechanically deformed human skin using polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). The papillary-dermal birefringence of the forehead increased significantly when the skin was shrunk parallel to the body axis, and decreased significantly when the skin was shrunk perpendicular to the body axis. En-face images of the papillary-dermal birefringence revealed variations among individual subjects, and that both shrinking parallel to and stretching in perpendicular to the body axis promoted the formation of macro rope-like birefringent domains. We found that PS-OCT is useful for understanding anisotropic properties of collagen structure in the skin.

Three-dimensional multi-contrast imaging of in vivo human skin by Jones matrix optical coherence tomography

“…Almost all previous PS-OCT studies used phase retardation imaging to investigate collagen-related skin alteration and optical properties, such as age-related alteration and photo-aging [19], and some mechanical skin properties [52]. Because birefringence imaging enables a more accurate and quantitative evaluation of tissue property than the phase retardation images [22], it will enable further investigation of skin properties, alteration, and pathologies.…”

Feasibility of ablative fractional laser-assisted drug delivery with optical coherence tomography

“…With the development of Fourier-domain OCT, including spectral-domain OCT (SD-OCT) and swept-source OCT (SS-OCT), can provide a high imaging sensitivity in biological tissue [18][19][20][21][22][23]. Currently, OCT has become a clinical approach for various disease diagnoses, such as ophthalmology [24-27], dermatology [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], cardiology [37,38], and gastrointestinal tract [39,40]. For dermatology applications, some groups have demonstrated that OCT can be used for diagnoses of skin diseases, skin cancer [28,29], sun damage [30], and burn depth [31].…”

“…For dermatology applications, some groups have demonstrated that OCT can be used for diagnoses of skin diseases, skin cancer [28,29], sun damage [30], and burn depth [31]. With polarization-sensitive OCT, the human burn scars can be quantitatively analyzed, and human skin at different ages can be differentiated [32][33][34][35]. Moreover, OCT-based angiography has been used for identification of skin diseases [36].…”

Investigation of temporal vascular effects induced by focused ultrasound treatment with speckle-variance optical coherence tomography

“…Aside from three-dimensionally reconstructing the microstructures of biological tissue, there has been intensive development of functional imaging abilities, such as angiography [32][33][34][35][36][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], birefringence [45,46], and spectroscopic properties [47,48]. In the past decade, numerous groups have focused on the development of angiography techniques based on OCT, including phase-resolved Doppler OCT (PRDOCT) [32,33], scattering optical coherence angiography [34,35], speckle variance [36,[38][39][40], optical micro-angiography [41,42], and correlation mapping method [43,44].…”