Towards Intraoperative Quantification of Atrial Fibrosis Using Light-Scattering Spectroscopy and Convolutional Neural Networks.

Light-scattering spectroscopy (LSS) is an established optical approach for characterization of biological tissues. Here, we investigated the capabilities of LSS and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to quantitatively characterize the composition and arrangement of cardiac tissues. We assembled tissue constructs from fixed myocardium and the aortic wall with a thickness similar to that of the atrial free wall.