Characterization of age-related follicle changes in mice ovaries using optical coherence tomography

Ovarian tissue cryopreservation is used to frozen preserve ovary tissue for reimplantation, potentially restoring a cancer patient's fertility after chemo and/or radiation treatment. The selection of ovary tissue containing many primordial and secondary follicles for reimplantation increases the probability of pregnancy, but it is a challenging task. In this work, we used spectral-domain OCT to evaluate the feasibility of non-invasively characterizing the morphology of ovary follicle development and age-related modifications in mice. The measured dimension and age-related number of follicles presented a good agreement with corresponding histological images, demonstrating the potential to use OCT to evaluate ovary tissue for reimplantation.