Abstract
Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is one of the most profound public health concerns of the modern era, affecting 466 million people today, and projected to affect 900 million by the year 2050. Advances in both diagnostics and therapeutics for SNHL have been impeded by the human cochlea’s inaccessibility for in vivo imaging, resulting from its extremely small size, convoluted coiled configuration, fragility, and deep encasement in dense bone. Here, we develop and demonstrate the ability of a sub-millimeter-diameter, flexible endoscopic probe interfaced with a micro-optical coherence tomography (μOCT) imaging system to enable micron-scale imaging of the inner ear’s sensory epithelium in cadaveric human inner ears.
Highlights
Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is one of the most profound public health concerns of the modern era, affecting 466 million people today, and projected to affect 900 million by the year 2050
To address these clinical needs, we developed a sub-millimeter diameter, flexible endomicroscopic probe, interfaced it with a system that performs μOCT imaging with micron-scale resolution, and tested its ability to image the organ of Corti from within the cochlea in intact cadaveric human temporal bone specimens. μOCT is a high-resolution descendant of optical coherence tomography (OCT), a cross-sectional imaging technique that generates two- and three-dimensional images by measuring properties of the back-scattered or back-reflected light from different depths within a biological tissue
The present images are the first, to our knowledge, μOCT-based images of the organ of Corti acquired with an imaging probe inserted into scala tympani via a round window approach
Summary
Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is one of the most profound public health concerns of the modern era, affecting 466 million people today, and projected to affect 900 million by the year 2050. The lack of a clinical intracochlear imaging technique prevents otologists from positioning electrode arrays during cochlear implantation with specificity and consistency; blind electrode array insertion may in part explain the high variability in hearing outcomes for cochlear implant p atients[3,4]. To address these clinical needs, we developed a sub-millimeter diameter, flexible endomicroscopic probe, interfaced it with a system that performs μOCT imaging with micron-scale resolution, and tested its ability to image the organ of Corti from within the cochlea in intact cadaveric human temporal bone specimens. OCT has achieved recent attention and popularity for its diverse range of clinical applications[5,6,7], and it is well-suited for intracochlear imaging because of its minimally invasive nature, its ability to afford micron-scale resolution, and the ease with which it can be interfaced with endoscopes to access the body’s interior[5]
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