Identifying gastric cancer by optical coherence tomography based on an optimized depth-resolved attenuation estimation

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a reliable technique for cancer detection, with the potential to improve accuracy in identifying cancerous tissue through effective use of OCT image data. We proposed an optimized depth resolution estimation based optical attenuation coefficient (OAC) mapping method to reduce the error effect caused by discretization without considering whether the light is completely attenuated or not. The attenuation coefficient maps of gastric tissue were reconstructed using this method. Features were extracted from these maps using gray-level co-occurrence matrix and gray histogram, and a support vector machine was employed as a classifier for identifying gastric cancer tissues. The recognition accuracy achieved was 98.60%, which was higher than the 94.30% accuracy in the control group without OACs. This approach enhances the utilization of OCT image information and improves its practical application ability by increasing the recognition accuracy.