Colorimetric fusion of attenuation and birefringence in OCT signatures: a screening tool for evaluating muscular degradation in alpha-sarcoglican deficit murine models

Abstract

In this work, intensity and polarization OCT were applied, simultaneously, to alpha-sarcoglycan deficit mice models, and a new visualization technique was implemented, based on encoding the attenuation and birefringence values in the HSV color space. Our samples consisted of 14 ex-vivo mice quadriceps at different disease stages (one, three, and six-month-old mice) and four healthy ones for reference. The healthy muscles present a different birefringence distribution to the dystrophic ones, while attenuation values for both kinds of samples lay in the same range. Nevertheless, the attenuation provides an increase in contrast and textural features that are not visible by only using birefringence, while the latter, encoded in the H coordinate, helps to easily identify damage inside the samples by color.