Development of handheld optical coherent elastic imaging system

Abstract

Optical coherence elastography (OCE) is a new biomedical optical elastic imaging technology. It inherits the advantage of optical coherence tomography (OCT) with high resolution, and it has sub-nanometer displacement measurement sensitivity. OCE uses OCT to detect the deformation of biological tissue along the depth direction under loading, so as to obtain the elastic information of tissue. Among the OCE forms with various loading strategies, compression OCE has attracted great interests for its ease of implementation. However, the quantitative measurement of the loading remains a challenge. Therefore, in this study, we developed a handheld OCE system based on compression OCE with a specially designed stress sensor for loading measurement. The OCE system is built based on swept-source OCT, and a handheld sampling probe was developed with a specially-designed pressure sensor for load measurement. The OCE probe with the stress sensor is evaluated on both artificial phantom and human skin. The results show that the OCE system has a good potential for elasticity measurement on biological tissues in vivo.