Optical coherence tomography‐based non‐invasive evaluation of premalignant lesions in SKH‐1 mice

Abstract

Non‐invasively diagnosis of actinic keratoses (AK) is important for preventing cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC). Optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be used to detect the cross‐sectional skin micromorphology with sufficient resolution and imaging depth. It has the capability to reveal the changes in skin microstructure during the development of AK. Therefore, OCT can serve as a tool for diagnosing AK. This study explores the feasibility of OCT in evaluating the structural changes in mouse skin at the different stages following exposure to ultraviolet radiation. The performance of OCT is compared with histology, the gold standard in this context. The imaging results demonstrate that a wave‐shaped irregular dermo‐epidermal junction (DEJ), as well as the continuous thickening of the epidermis, are useful diagnostic parameters for diagnosing AK. Histological examinations confirm these observations. These findings emphasize the need for effective skin protection or medical treatment once changes in the DEJ and epidermis are detected. OCT shows strong potential for non‐invasive evaluation of such changes and AK development, and can be used for the prevention of cSCC without the necessity of taking biopsies.

YAP1/Piezo1 involve in the dynamic changes of lymphatic vessels in UVR-induced photoaging progress to squamous cell carcinoma

“…According to the previous article published by Wang et al, this stage is precancerous, which is in line with the performance of AK. 21 After 20 weeks of UVR, cSCC lesions occurred, 21,23 shown in our study as well.…”

“…According to the Zhou et al paper, the concrete steps adopted the protocol described in the scheme. 21…”

Research progress on the application of optical coherence tomography in the field of oncology

“…Zhou et al., used an SD-OCT to image AK lesions of varying degrees in mice, which showed that the irregular wavy dermal-epidermal junction (DEJ) and persistent thickening of the epidermis are useful diagnostic parameters for AK. It demonstrates the great potential of OCT for non-invasive diagnosis of precancerous lesions ( 47 ). Cinotti et al.…”

“…Zhou et al, used an SD-OCT to image AK lesions of varying degrees in mice, which showed that the irregular wavy dermal-epidermal junction (DEJ) and persistent thickening of the epidermis are useful diagnostic parameters for AK. It demonstrates the great potential of OCT for non-invasive diagnosis of precancerous lesions (47) Conventional OCT is considered to be less sensitive for detecting early-stage melanoma, but it has the highest sensitivity compared to other techniques such as confocal microscopy, ultrasonography, and multispectral imaging. The imaging results of high-definition OCT (HD-OCT) and speckle variance OCT (SV-OCT) for melanoma are more positive than conventional OCT.…”

Semisupervised representative learning for measuring epidermal thickness in human subjects in optical coherence tomography by leveraging datasets from rodent models

“…As human and mouse skin have similar cellular compositions in the dermis and epidermis, rodent model has been employed to mimic human skin disorder based on OCT in recent years to derisk clinical trials on humans. [24][25][26][27][28] The OCT data based on rodent models are typically abundant due to there being more accessibility, allowing the use of a relatively high number of animals for statistical validation. 19,[27][28][29][30][31] One explosive space of research in the self-supervised representation learning is contrastive learning, which has gained increasing attention by showing robust performance for image segmentation using the learned representation in ImageNet.…”