Detection of tumorigenesis in urinary bladder with optical coherence tomography: Optical characterization of morphological changes

The sensitivity and limitations of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in diagnosing and staging bladder cancer were presented. The resultant backscattering changes and the characteristic changes in OCT image contrast were modeled. It was assumed that nuclei were the primary sources of scattering and were uniformly distributed in the uroepithelium. Results show that OCT is not sensitive enough to differentiate the subtle morphological changes.