Multimodal optical coherence microscopy and texture analysis for ex vivo brain tumors from fluorescence-guided surgery

Maximal safe resection is key to prolonging overall survival during intracranial surgery. Capabilities of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to discriminate tissue types have been previously reported. We utilized an OCT-based microscope (OCM) to acquire reflectivity data of resected brain tumor samples and perform textural analyses. Twelve features showed statistically significant differences between different tissue types. Three of those – contrast, energy and entropy – are described in detail in this work. Contrast and entropy increased with tissue malignancy, and energy decreased. These results suggest that OCM data-based textural analyses are capable of differentiating different tissue types based on their intrinsic structures.