In vivo functional imaging of the human middle ear with a hand-held optical coherence tomography device

Christopher G Lui; Wihan Kim; James B Dewey; Frank D Macías-Escrivá; Kumara Ratnayake; John S Oghalai; Brian E Applegate

doi:10.1364/BOE.430935

In vivo functional imaging of the human middle ear with a hand-held optical coherence tomography device

Biomed Opt Express. 2021 Jul 22;12(8):5196-5213. doi: 10.1364/BOE.430935. eCollection 2021 Aug 1.

Authors

Christopher G Lui^{1

2}, Wihan Kim^{1

2}, James B Dewey¹, Frank D Macías-Escrivá¹, Kumara Ratnayake¹, John S Oghalai¹, Brian E Applegate^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, 1450 San Pablo Street, Suite 5708, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA.
² These authors contributed equally to this work.
³ Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, 1042 Downey Way, Denney Research Center (DRB) 140, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.

Abstract

We describe an optical coherence tomography and vibrometry system designed for portable hand-held usage in the otology clinic on awake patients. The system provides clinically relevant point-of-care morphological imaging with 14-44 µm resolution and functional vibratory measures with sub-nanometer sensitivity. We evaluated various new approaches for extracting functional information including a multi-tone stimulus, a continuous chirp stimulus, and alternating air and bone stimulus. We also explored the vibratory response over an area of the tympanic membrane (TM) and generated TM thickness maps. Our results suggest that the system can provide real-time in vivo imaging and vibrometry of the ear and could prove useful for investigating otologic pathology in the clinic setting.

Abstract

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