Thesis defense of Léna WASZCZUK

Thesis defense of Léna WASZCZUK, PhD student in the Biophotonics group of the Laboratoire Charles Fabry, on 09 January 2023 at 2pm in the Auditorium of the Institut d'Optique in Palaiseau, on the topic : "Multimodal spectroscopy-enhanced line-field confocal optical coherence tomography (LC-OCT) for skin cancer diagnosis."

Abstract: "According to the World Health Organization, 1/3 of all cancers are skin cancer. The diagnosis of skin cancers is based on a clinical examination followed by a biopsy and a histological analysis. Moreover, since the biopsy is decided on the basis of a visual inspection of the skin surface, many cancers are missed at an early stage when they are still curable. Line-field confocal optical coherence tomography (LC-OCT) is an interferometric imaging technique invented at the Charles Fabry Laboratory at the Institut d’Optique, and developed by the company DAMAE Medical. LC-OCT allows to perform optical biopsies in vivo, providing cell-level images of skin lesions in a non-invasive manner. However, LC-OCT only provides morphological information, whereas histology provides complementary functional information through the use of dyes, which selectively bind to specific structures in the sample. This thesis presents the developments carried out to bring complementary information to LC-OCT imaging, based on two different approaches. In a first approach, we investigate how complementary information can be obtained from existing images, by extracting the optical scattering properties (scattering coefficient and scattering anisotropy factor) from LC-OCT images at a macroscopic scale. In a second approach, we present the coupling of LC-OCT to confocal Raman microspectroscopy, a technique based on the analysis of chemical bond vibrations, allowing to provide local molecular information within a 3D LC-OCT image."