Diagnostic accuracy of optical coherence tomography for assessing surgical margins of canine soft tissue sarcomas in observers of different specialties.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the diagnostic accuracy of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to assess surgical margins of canine soft tissue sarcoma (STS) and determine the influence of observer specialty and training. STUDY DESIGN: Blinded clinical prospective study. ANIMALS: Twenty-five dogs undergoing surgical excision of STS. METHODS: In vivo and ex vivo surgical margins were imaged with OCT after tumor resection. Representative images and videos were used to generate a training presentation and data sets. These were completed by 16 observers of four specialties (surgery, radiology, pathology, and OCT researchers). Images and videos from data sets were classified as cancerous or noncancerous. RESULTS: The overall sensitivity and specificity were 88.2% and 92.8%, respectively, for in vivo tissues and 82.5% and 93.3%, respectively, for ex vivo specimens. The overall accurate classification for all specimens was 91.4% in vivo and 89.5% ex vivo. There was no difference in accuracy of interpretation of OCT imaging by observers of different specialties or experience levels. CONCLUSION: Use of OCT to accurately assess surgical margins after STS excision was associated with a high sensitivity and specificity among various specialties. Personnel of all specialties and experience levels could effectively be trained to interpret OCT imaging. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE: Optical coherence tomography can be used by personnel of different specialty experience levels and from various specialties to accurately identify canine STS in vivo and ex vivo after a short training session. These encouraging results provide evidence to justify further research to assess the ability of OCT to provide real-time assessments of surgical margins and its applicability to other neoplasms.

Diagnostic accuracy of optical coherence tomography for surgical margin assessment of feline injection-site sarcoma.

The invasive, locally aggressive nature of feline injection-site sarcomas (FISSs) poses a unique challenge for surgeons to obtain complete margins with surgical excision. Optical coherence tomography (OCT), an imaging technology that uses light waves to generate real-time views of tissue architecture, provides an emerging solution to this dilemma by allowing fast, high-resolution scanning of surgical margins. The purpose of this study was to use OCT to assess surgical margins of FISS and to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of OCT for detecting residual cancer using six evaluators of varying experience. Five FISSs were imaged with OCT to create a training set of OCT images that were compared with histopathology. Next, 25 FISSs were imaged with OCT prior to histopathology. Six evaluators of varying experience participated in a training session on OCT imaging after which each of the evaluators was given a dataset that included OCT images and videos to score on a scale from cancerous to non-cancerous. Diagnostic accuracy statistics were calculated. The overall sensitivity and specificity for classification of OCT images by evaluators were 78.9% and 77.6%, respectively. Correct classification rate of OCT images was associated with experience, while individual sensitivities and specificities had more variation between experience groups. This study demonstrates the ability of evaluators to correctly classify OCT images with overall low levels of experience and training and also illustrates areas where increased training can improve accuracy of evaluators in interpretation of OCT surgical margin images.