OCE-based quasistatic elasto-spectroscopy to characterize tumors by their linear and nonlinear elasticity

We present a novel method, which by analogy with the term "mass-spectroscopy" can be called "quasistatic elasto-spectoscopy" based on quantitative compressional Optical Coherence Elastogrphy (C-OCE). The method relies on initial determining of characteristic stiffness ranges for various morphological components of the tissue by comparing the OCE-based stiffness maps and histology. Such pre-calibration allows one to perform morphological segmentation of OCE-images demonstrating excellent correlation with segmentation of conventional histological images, but can be performed using freshly-extracted samples and even in vivo.