Aging of deep venous thrombosis in-vivo using polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography

Georgia L Jones; Hassan Albadawi; Lida P Hariri; Brett E Bouma; Rahmi Oklu; Martin Villiger

doi:10.1364/BOE.522238

Aging of deep venous thrombosis in-vivo using polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography

Biomed Opt Express. 2024 May 3;15(6):3627-3638. doi: 10.1364/BOE.522238. eCollection 2024 Jun 1.

Authors

Georgia L Jones^{1

2}, Hassan Albadawi³, Lida P Hariri^{2

4

5}, Brett E Bouma^{1

2}, Rahmi Oklu³, Martin Villiger²

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
² Harvard Medical School and Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
³ Division of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, AZ 85259, USA.
⁴ Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
⁵ Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.

Abstract

Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is a medical condition with significant post-event morbidity and mortality coupled with limited treatment options. Treatment strategy and efficacy are highly dependent on the structural composition of the thrombus, which evolves over time from initial formation and is currently unevaluable with standard clinical testing. Here, we investigate the use of intravascular polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) to assess thrombus morphology and composition in a rat DVT model in-vivo, including changes that occur over the thrombus aging process. PS-OCT measures tissue birefringence, which provides contrast for collagen and smooth muscle cells that are present in older, chronic clots. Thrombi in the inferior vena cava of two cohorts of rats were imaged in-vivo with intravascular PS-OCT at 24 hours (acute, n_rats = 3, 73 cross-sections) or 28 days (chronic, n_rats= 4, 41 cross-sections) after thrombus formation. Co-registered histology was labelled by an independent pathologist to establish ground-truth clot composition. Automated analysis of OCT cross-sectional images differentiated acute and chronic thrombi with 97.6% sensitivity and 98.6% specificity using a linear discriminant model comprised of both polarization and conventional OCT metrics. These results support PS-OCT as a highly sensitive imaging modality for the assessment of DVT composition to differentiate acute and chronic thrombi. Intravascular PS-OCT imaging could be integrated with advanced catheter-based treatment strategies and serve to guide therapeutic decision-making and deployment, by offering an accurate assessment of DVT patients in real time.