Temperature and OCT imaging monitoring in photothermal therapy of breast cancer

Abstract

Malignant tumor is a serious threat to human health. With the development of medical technology, a variety of treatment methods appear in clinic. As a non-invasive treatment, laser photothermal therapy is a treatment that kills cancer cells by converting light energy into heat energy through laser irradiation. Its advantage is protecting normal tissue while destroying cancerous tissue. However, it's still not clear that the effect of heat generated by laser on tissue and temperature changes during photothermal treatment process. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-contract, real-time optical imaging technology. OCT has been widely used in clinical treatment and scientific research based on fast imaging speed and high detection sensitivity. In our study, breast cancer of mice was chosen as the research object. Combined infrared thermography and OCT were applied to monitor the dynamic changes of tumor tissue. The effect of photothermal from OCT image and temperature were obtained and analyzed. Specifically, we investigated the structural change characteristics and temperature distribution of tumor tissue with increasing laser power. And then, the temperature change of tumors of different sizes at power of 3W were further analyzed. The results show that combined with OCT images and temperature can be well used to guide the photothermal treatment process. It can serve as a basis for the method with safely, consistently and effectively.