Co-registration of in vivo optical coherence tomography with histology performed on breast cavity shavings (Conference Presentation)

Breast-conserving surgery is the most common surgical treatment of early-stage breast cancers, however, 20-30% of patients require re-excisions due to close or involved margins. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is readily implemented in compact handheld probes and represents a promising solution to this issue through in vivo imaging of the surgical cavity for residual cancer. Currently, in vivo OCT has only been validated indirectly by correlating with ex vivo histology of adjacent tissue, thus providing an inaccurate validation of in vivo imaging performance. We propose a novel co-registration method for in vivo OCT imaging with postoperative histology of the excised surgical shaving, directly corresponding to the tissue imaged in vivo. Using this method, we have successfully co-registered 78% of 139 in vivo OCT scans from 16 patients. We present a detailed analysis of imaged tissue microarchitecture and describe how this method can be utilised for functional extensions of OCT.