Fig. 1.

Elucidation of experimental OCE procedures. Panel (a) is the photo of a typical breast-tissue sample; (b) shows the OCT probe pressing onto the studied sample; (c) is a color-coded map of inter-frame phase variation; (d) structural OCT B-scan of cancerous tissue under reference silicone; (e) is the reconstructed OCE image obtained for the pre-selected strain level in the silicone (and, thus, standardized pressure applied to the tissue); (f) is a histogram showing the normalized stiffness spectrum (percentage of pixels with different Young modulus) in the tissue within the chosen ROI window shown by the dashed rectangle in the tissue in panel (e). The small rectange in panel (e) in the upper silicone layer shows the area size, over which the phase-variation gradient was averaged for estimating local strains.