Quantitative measurement on optical attenuation coefficient of cell lines 5-8F and 6-10B using optical coherence tomography.

Oncogenesis and metastasis of tumor are difficult to detect during the clinic therapy. To explore the optical properties of tumorigenesis and metastasis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), we assessed the NPC cell lines 5-8F and 6-10B by optical coherence tomography (OCT): first, the OCT images of the two different types of cell pellets were captured. Second, by fitting Beer's law to the averaged A-scans in these OCT datasets, the attenuation coefficients (μt) of the cells were extracted. The median attenuation coefficients (interquartile range (IQR)) of 5-8F and 6-10B were 6.79 mm-1 (IQR 6.52 to 7.23 mm-1) versus 8.06 mm-1 (IQR 7.65 to 8.40 mm-1), respectively (p < 0.01, df = 39). Subsequently, the results were compared with those obtained by polarization sensitive OCT, which further confirmed that the quantitative OCT analysis (by μt) could differentiate the oncogenesis and metastasis NPC cell lines in real time non-invasively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]