[Excerpt]

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has extended the use of 3D imaging technology to screen oesophageal and colon cancer. The new imaging system is based on Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and has the advantage of detecting underlying microscopic pre-cancerous tissues.  …

What Is New?

OCT is similar to medical ultrasound imaging; only that OCT uses light instead of sound waves to detect pre-cancerous tissues that lie below the surface. OCT utilizes light waves of higher resolution to see images in the body in real time and can capture data equivalent to 980 frames or 480, 000 axial scans, which is 10 times faster than existing devices. The system can also measure microscopic features lesser than eight millionth of a meter in size.

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…  Fujimoto, lead author of the paper said, “Ultra high speed imaging is important because it enables the acquisition of large three dimensional volumetric data sets with micron-scale resolution.”

“This new system represents a significant advance in real-time, 3-D endoscopic OCT imaging in that it offers the highest volumetric imaging speed in an endoscopic setting, while maintaining a small probe size and a low, safe drive voltage,” says Xingde Li, associate professor at the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who is not affiliated with the research team.  …

The Procedure:

For endoscopic OCT, miniature probes with diameters of a few millimeters are needed, which can scan optical beams in two dimensions to generate high-resolution 3-D data sets. While scanning the beam in one transverse direction generates image in a cross-sectional plane; scanning the beam in two directions generates a stack of cross-sectional images or  3-D (volumetric) image.

The optical catheter developed by MIT researchers and their collaborators utilizes a piezoelectric transducer, a miniature device that bends in response to electrical current, allowing a laser-light emitting optical fibre to be rapidly scanned over the area to be imaged.  …