Real-time deep learning assisted skin layer delineation in dermal optical coherence tomography

We present deep learning assisted optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging for quantitative tissue characterization and differentiation in dermatology. We utilize a manually scanned single fiber OCT (sfOCT) instrument to acquire OCT images from the skin. The focus of this study is to train a U-Net for automatic skin layer delineation. We demonstrate that U-Net allows quantitative assessment of epidermal thickness automatically. U-Net segmentation achieves high accuracy for epidermal thickness estimation for normal skin and leads to a clear differentiation between normal skin and skin lesions. Our results suggest that a single fiber OCT instrument with AI assisted skin delineation capability has the potential to become a cost-effective tool in clinical dermatology, for diagnosis and tumor margin detection.