ABSTRACT
Surgery is an essential component of brain cancer management. Glioma is the most common adult primary brain cancer, with inevitable recurrence and finite survival times. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive, label-free, and cost-effective technology that can provide continuous, real-time imaging of three dimensional tissue anatomy at micron-level resolution in the operating room. This chapter discusses new OCT findings in neurosurgery, and how optical property maps can be derived from OCT imaging data to provide direct visual cues for surgeons to detect brain cancer infiltration. Intra-operative cancer versus noncancer tissue differentiation is very difficult to achieve by the naked eye and even with the use of the operating microscope. OCT is an optical analog of ultrasound, except that OCT uses a near-infrared light rather than sound waves, and does not require the use of any matching medium, for example, gels.
