Colorectal cancer assessment using optical coherence tomography catheter and deep learning

In this study, we propose to combine miniaturized optical coherence tomography (OCT) catheter with pattern recognition (PR) OCT for differentiation of normal from neoplastic colorectal tissue in real-time. The OCT catheter has a lateral resolution of 17.15 um and an axial resolution of 6 um. The PR-OCT system is trained by RetinaNet for pattern recognition tasks. Our method leverages the recent advancement in object detection, which localizes and classifies the diagnostic features at real-time, and the integration of an endoscopy, which promises future in vivo studies. According to our previous reports, a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 99.7% can be reached.