Automatic renal carcinoma biopsy guidance using forward-viewing endoscopic optical coherence tomography and deep learning

Percutaneous renal biopsy (PRB) is commonly used for kidney cancer diagnosis. However, current PRB remains challenging in sampling accuracy. This study introduces a forward-viewing optical coherence tomography (OCT) probe for differentiating tumor and normal tissues, aiming at precise PRB guidance. Five human kidneys and renal carcinoma samples were used to evaluate the performance of our probe. Based on their distinct OCT imaging features, tumor and normal renal tissues can be accurately distinguished. We examined the attenuation coefficient for tissue classification and achieved 98.19% tumor recognition accuracy, but underperformed for distinguishing normal tissues. We further developed convolutional neural networks (CNN) and evaluated two CNN architectures: ResNet50 and InceptionV3, yielding 99.51% and 99.48% accuracies for tumor recognition, and over 98.90% for normal tissues recognition. In conclusion, combining OCT and CNN significantly enhanced the PRB guidance, offering a promising guidance technology for improved kidney cancer diagnosis.