ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses progress in the use of optical clearing agent (OCA) permeability coefficients for the differentiation of normal and abnormal tissue using optical coherence tomography (OCT). The tissue optical clearing (TOC) technique shows that treatment with OCAs allows researchers to effectively improve the optical properties of biological tissue. Through this strategy, the highly light-scattering nature of tissue can be reduced, therefore enhancing the efficacy of the application of various optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques for better scientific research. Those research findings could meaningfully improve the specificity and accuracy of tissue identification and promote the use of OCT in clinical disease diagnostic imaging. In addition, this chapter also provides a detailed discussion of the application of physical and nanotechnology methods for enhancing OCA diffusion and OCT imaging ability. All of these chapters suggest that TOC has great potential for clinical early diagnosis of morphology alternations of the tissues using OCT. The permeability coefficients of OCAs and the interactions of OCAs with tissues will be discussed in Sec. 32.1. Section 32.2 will discuss the physicochemical penetration enhancement and nanoparticle contrast enhancement methods for OCT imaging, and Sec. 32.3 will discuss the challenges and perspectives for use of TOC in optical clinical medicine.
