Disease alters both the micro-structural and micro-mechanical properties of tissue. These changes in mechanical properties manifest at the macro-scale, enabling clinicians to diagnose disease through manual palpation. This has been a primary motivator for elastography, however, in the development of elastography, manual palpation’s key advantages of dexterity and simplicity are lost. Combining manual palpation and elastography would, potentially, preserve these advantages whilst also providing clinicians with quantitative, high-resolution imaging necessary to overcome the subjective and inherently low spatial resolution of manual palpation. Optical coherence elastography (OCE) is particularly well-suited to imaging subtle changes in mechanical properties owing to its high spatial resolution and sensitivity to nanometer-scale displacement. Additionally, as OCE is an optics-based technique, it is readily implemented in compact probes, such as those already demonstrated in needles and endoscopes. Here, we propose a finger-mounted OCE probe, based on quantitative micro-elastography (QME) in a forward-facing configuration, and using the operator’s finger to apply compressive loading. A compliant silicone layer, with known mechanical properties, is placed on the sample and enables quantification of the sample’s elasticity. This finger-mounted probe is designed to preserve the dexterity of manual palpation, whilst providing quantitative, high-resolution images. In this study, we demonstrate the accuracy of finger-mounted OCE to be >70% in measuring the elasticity of tissue mimicking phantoms, and highlight the ability to delineate materials with different mechanical properties. Further, we present results performed on kangaroo muscle tissue and outline the developments required to translate this into a clinically feasible diagnostic tool.
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