Abstrait

Morphological and molecular imaging of skin samples

Edgar Guevara, Jose Manuel Gutierrez-Hernandez, Alexandre Castonguay, Frederic Lesage, Benjam

An exhaustive characterization of skin samples is a necessary step in investigating dermatological disorders. By combining depth sensitive morphological imaging with molecular imaging, we aim to provide multiple pieces of information about the skin. In this work, we present tridimensional, highresolution mosaic images of skin biopsies using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) co-registered with standard microscopy, bi-dimensional Raman spectral mapping, and fluorescence imaging. A paraffin-embedded skin sample of a healthy human breast (female, age=49), was imaged with a sweptsource OCT system at 1310 nm. Individual OCT volumes were acquired in a fully automated fashion in order to obtain a relatively large field-of-view (~ 2 × 2 cm) at high resolution (~ 10 μm). Using anatomical landmarks, the other three modalities were manually co-registered to the surface of the OCT volume, using an affine transformation. The main limitation of our method is manual co-registration, which may hamper its effectiveness. Nonetheless, the results suggest that the concomitant use of several imaging modalities may provide morphological and molecular information about the sample. Our results suggest the use of multi-modal microscopy as a tool in skin biopsies characterization.