Despite the large population that suffers from inner ear diseases, there is a limited understanding and capacity to diagnose the cellular origins of inner ear diseases. One major obstacle is difficulty accessing and observing the inner ear in living patients. We developed an ultra-flexible miniature micro-OCT endoscope that can be inserted into the scala tympani through the round window over more than 20 mm and take cellular resolution OCT images. It has the potential to provide physicians with a new diagnostic approach for tailoring next-generation cochlear implants and administering personalized pharmacologic treatments for a wide variety of inner ear diseases.
We have developed a new self-propelled OCT imaging technology called retrograde Tethered Capsule Endomicroscopy
(R-TCE) for colonic disease screening. We successfully demonstrated that the R-TCE device can be advanced over 1 meter in 5 swine colons in vivo. R-TCE with balloon pullback imaging enabled full circumferential OCT visualization of 95.94 % ± 0.13% of the colon wall. 3D reconstructed colon OCT images and 3D rendered flythroughs showed that R-TCE is feasible for OCT microscopic imaging of the entire colon in vivo. When translated to humans, this R-TCE
technology may provide a less invasive and more efficient alternative to colonoscopy.
To address the unmet need to study the microstructure changes in the cochlea that occur with sensorineural hearing loss, we have constructed a miniature flexible micro-OCT catheter that can be inserted into the human cochlea and acquire images with cellular-level resolution. The OCT catheter was designed, fabricated, and characterized. Crucial mechanical properties (flexibility, insertion force) were measured and found to be comparable to those of commercial cochlear implants. These early results suggest that this new device may provide a viable approach for diagnosing SNHL and selecting the most appropriate treatments on an individual patient basis.
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