Guidance of epidural needle is important for the safe and efficient epidural anesthesia procedure. In this study, we built an endoscopic system based on polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). We used pig backbones to test the feasibility of our PS-OCT endoscopic system. Different spinal tissue layers that epidural needle punctures through including subcutaneous fat, ligament, ligamentum flavum, epidural space and spinal cord were imaged and analyzed. They showed different imaging features on the PS-OCT imaging results. Furthermore, we applied deep-learning methods to classify those tissue types automatically to improve the recognition efficiency.
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