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Skin optical clearing can significantly enhance the ability of biomedical optical imaging. Some alcohols and sugars have been selected to be optical clearing agents (OCAs). In this work, we paid attention to the optical clearing potential of disaccharides. Sucrose and maltose were chosen as typical disaccharides to compare with fructose, an excellent monosaccharide-OCA, by using molecular dynamics simulation and an ex vivo experiment. The experimental results indicated that the optical clearing efficacy of skin increases linearly with the concentration for each OCA. Both the theoretical predication and experimental results revealed that the two disaccharides exerted a better optical clearing potential than fructose at the same concentration, and sucrose is optimal. Since maltose has an extremely low saturation concentration, the other two OCAs with saturation concentrations were treated topically on rat skin in vivo, and optical coherence tomography imaging was applied to monitor the optical clearing process. The results demonstrated that sucrose could cause a more significant increase in imaging depth and signal intensity than fructose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to evaluate the concept of using high-resolution optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging to rapidly assess surgical specimens and determine if cancer positive margins were left behind in the surgical bed. A mouse model of breast cancer was used in this study. Surgical specimens from 30 animals were investigated with OCT and automated interpretation of the OCT images was performed and tested against histopathology findings. Specimens from 10 animals were used to build a training set of OCT images, while the remaining 20 specimens were used for a validation set of images. The validation study showed that automated interpretation of OCT images can differentiate tissue types and detect cancer positive margins with at least 81 % sensitivity and 89% specificity. The findings of this pilot study suggest that OCT imaging of surgical specimens and automated interpretation of OCT data may enable in the future real-time feedback to the surgeon about margin status in patients with breast cancer, and potentially with other types of cancers. Currently, such feedback is not provided and if positive margins are left behind, patients have to undergo another surgical procedure. Therefore, this approach can have a potentially high impact on breast surgery outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]