On the possibility of time-lapse ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography for bladder cancer grading.

It has been recently demonstrated that the cellular details of bladder epithelium embedded in speckle noise can be uncovered with time-lapse ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography (TL-uOCT) by proper time-lapse frame averaging that takes advantage of cellular micromotion in fresh biological tissue ex vivo. Here, spectral-domain 3-D TL-uOCT is reported to further improve the image fidelity, and new experimental evidence is presented to differentiate normal and cancerous nuclei of rodent bladder epithelia. Results of animal cancer study reveal that despite a slight overestimation (e.g., <10%) of nuclear size (D(N)) to histological evaluation, TL-uOCT is capable of distinguishing normal (D(N) approximately 7 microm) and cancerous (e.g., high-grade D(N(") ) approximately 13 microm) urothelia, which may potentially be very useful for enhancing the diagnosis of nonpapillary bladder cancer. More animal study is being conducted to examine the utility to differentiate hyperplasia, dysplasia, and carcinoma in situ.