Nonlinear Elasticity Assessment with Optical Coherence Elastography for High-Selectivity Differentiation of Breast Cancer Tissues

Soft biological tissues, breast cancer tissues in particular, often manifest pronounced nonlinear elasticity, i.e., strong dependence of their Young’s modulus on the applied stress. We showed that compression optical coherence elastography (C-OCE) is a promising tool enabling the evaluation of nonlinear properties in addition to the conventionally discussed Young’s modulus in order to improve diagnostic accuracy of elastographic examination of tumorous tissues. The aim of this study was to reveal and quantify variations in stiffness for various breast tissue components depending on the applied pressure. We discussed nonlinear elastic properties of different breast cancer samples excised from 50 patients during breast-conserving surgery. Significant differences were found among various subtypes of tumorous and nontumorous breast tissues in terms of the initial Young’s modulus (estimated for stress < 1 kPa) and the nonlinearity parameter determining the rate of stiffness increase with increasing stress. However, Young’s modulus alone or the nonlinearity parameter alone may be insufficient to differentiate some malignant breast tissue subtypes from benign. For instance, benign fibrous stroma and fibrous stroma with isolated individual cancer cells or small agglomerates of cancer cells do not yet exhibit significant difference in the Young’s modulus. Nevertheless, they can be clearly singled out by their nonlinearity parameter, which is the main novelty of the proposed OCE-based discrimination of various breast tissue subtypes. This ability of OCE is very important for finding a clean resection boundary. Overall, morphological segmentation of OCE images accounting for both linear and nonlinear elastic parameters strongly enhances the correspondence with the histological slices and radically improves the diagnostic possibilities of C-OCE for a reliable clinical outcome

Diagnostic Accuracy of Cross-Polarization OCT and OCT-Elastography for Differentiation of Breast Cancer Subtypes: Comparative Study

The possibility to assess molecular-biological and morphological features of particular breast cancer types can improve the precision of resection margin detection and enable accurate determining of the tumor aggressiveness, which is important for treatment selection. To enable reliable differentiation of breast-cancer subtypes and evaluation of resection margin, without performing conventional histological procedures, here we apply cross-polarization optical coherence tomography (CP-OCT) and compare it with a novel variant of compressional optical coherence elastography (C-OCE) in terms of the diagnostic accuracy (Ac) with histological verification. The study used 70 excised breast cancer specimens with different morphological structure and molecular status (Luminal A, Luminal B, Her2/Neo+, non-luminal and triple-negative cancer). Our first aim was to formulate convenient criteria of visual assessment of CP-OCT and C-OCE images intended (i) to differentiate tumorous and non-tumorous tissues and (ii) to enable more precise differentiation among different malignant states. We identified such criteria based on the presence of heterogeneities and characteristics of signal attenuation in CP-OCT images, as well as the presence of inclusions/mosaic structures combined with visually feasible assessment of several stiffness grades in C-OCE images. Secondly, we performed a blinded reader study of the Ac of C-OCE versus CP-OCT, for delineation of tumorous versus non-tumorous tissues followed by identification of breast cancer subtypes. For tumor detection, C-OCE showed higher specificity than CP-OCT (97.5% versus 93.3%) and higher Ac (96.0 versus 92.4%). For the first time, the Ac of C-OCE and CP-OCT were evaluated for differentiation between non-invasive and invasive breast cancer (90.4% and 82.5%, respectively). Furthermore, for invasive cancers, the difference between invasive but low-aggressive and highly-aggressive subtypes can be detected. For differentiation between non-tumorous tissue and low-aggressive breast-cancer subtypes, Ac was 95.7% for C-OCE and 88.1% for CP-OCT. For differentiation between non-tumorous tissue and highly-aggressive breast cancers, Ac was found to be 98.3% for C-OCE and 97.2% for CP-OCT. In all cases C-OCE showed better diagnostic parameters independently of the tumor type. These findings confirm the high potential of OCT-based examinations for rapid and accurate diagnostics during breast conservation surgery