Port wine stains (PWS) are congenital vascular malformations that can lead to significant psychological and physical complications if untreated. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a common treatment but shows variable efficacy due to the heterogeneous vascular architecture of PWS lesions. Current diagnostic methods relying on skin surface appearance often fail to reflect underlying structural differences of PWS lesions, leading to erratic treatment effects.
Optical coherence tomography (#OCT) and OCT angiography (#OCTA) are promising tools for imaging PWS lesions. However, existing OCTA quantitative metrics cannot show significant differences among the various PWS subtypes based on clinical skin appearance diagnosis. This work proposes a fine-grained classification method for PWS using OCT and OCTA features. Compared with current clinical diagnosis based on skin appearance, the proposed method reveals the angiopathological heterogeneity of hypodermic PWS lesions and has the potential to provide more effective subtyping and treatment strategies for PWS.
Research team: Xiaofeng Deng, Defu Chen, Bowen Liu, Xiwan Zhang, Haixia Qiu, Wu ‘Scott’ YUAN, and Hongliang Ren.
Paper available at: 10.1109/JBHI.2025.3545931
