Improving the sensitivity of endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) to pre-cancerous esophageal lesions stands to improve patient outcomes. Although nuclei-level features relevant to dysplasia diagnoses are below conventional OCT systems’ resolution, tissue scattering properties report local particle size and concentration, indirectly accessing nuclei diameter and nuclear-cytoplasmic ratio (NCR). Recently, we have shown that acquiring co-registered images of a sample at different numerical aperture (NA) enhances scattering property measurements through angular diversity. We present preliminary results for a custom-designed, catheter-based, dual-NA endoscopic probe demonstrating improved characterization of phantoms and tissue with histological validation, and potential utility for more sensitive dysplasia diagnoses.
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