Abstract
Ciliary motion plays a critical role in the overall respiratory health of the upper airway. These cilia beat at a native frequency and in a synchronized pattern to continuously transport foreign particulate trapped in a layer of mucous out of the upper airway. Disruption of ciliary motion can lead to severe respiratory diseases and compromised respiratory function. Currently, the study of cilia requires expensive high speed cameras and high powered microscopes which is unsuitable for in vivo imaging and diagnosis. Doppler based optical coherence tomography has the potential to visualize the microscopic motion of cilia during their beating cycle. We demonstrate the development of a high-speed Doppler optical coherence tomography system that not only can rapidly determine the cilia beat frequency, but also simultaneously visualize the temporal cilia beating pattern which plays critical roles in cilia function.
Highlights
Outside of serving as the entrance to the respiratory system, the upper airway has a critical role in the immune system
We report on the use of swept source based Doppler Optical coherence tomography (OCT) system to study sub-axial resolution cilia in ex vivo airway epithelial tissue samples and calculate ciliary dynamics such as height and beat frequency versus different environmental factors such as temperature as well as the presence of a therapeutic drug
The low Ciliary beat frequency (CBF) can possibly be explained by the fact that our tissue samples were kept in room temperature buffer instead of at 37 °C since CBF is well known to have a dependence on temperature[39,40,41]
Summary
Outside of serving as the entrance to the respiratory system, the upper airway has a critical role in the immune system. Caused by ciliary motion using photomultiplier tubes[3, 12] and photodiodes[13] All of these approaches require the cilia samples to be studied under microscopy, either bright-field or phase contrast, and that the long axis of the cilia be oriented orthogonally to the illumination axis so that light isn’t blocked by the cilia substrate. None of these approaches are applicable for in vivo calculations of CBF in the respiratory tract where mucosal composition and environmental differences may alter the average beat frequency. Fluid flow measurements require contrast agents, either dyes or particles, which limits their in vivo applications
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