Micromechanical imaging of breast cancer with optical coherence elastography

Optical coherence elastography (OCE) is an imaging technique capable of mapping microscale mechanical properties (such as elasticity) in 3-D and is emerging as a valuable tool in the study of breast cancer due to mechanical contrast between healthy and malignant tissue. While the correlation between elevated elasticity in OCE and breast cancers has been well established, these studies have primarily focused on binary classifications of tissue as either malignant or benign, ignoring much of the heterogeneity present in breast tissue. In this work, we present an analysis of the micromechanical properties of breast tissues measured with OCE. We imaged 47 freshly excised mastectomy specimens with wide-field OCE, producing 254 manually segmented regions of interest of breast tissue subtypes, including benign stroma, ductal carcinoma in situ, invasive ductal carcinoma, and invasive lobular carcinoma, and provide a qualitative analysis of the texture present in the OCE images.