Abstract
Purpose :
Microscope-integrated optical coherence tomography provides live cross-sectional view of tissues during surgery. During porcine wet lab and recorded scans, we studied the feasibility of incremental enhancement of the live intraoperative OCT scans by analyzing their temporal consistency without interrupting the surgery.
Methods :
The suggested concept is the detection of temporal consistency of the live OCT scans and incrementally enhancing it through spatiotemporal analysis. This concept is specialized to live intraoperative OCT scans in contrast to the conventional diagnostic OCT in which the captured signal is enhanced after acquisition. Two groups of surgeons (6 in total) tested the suggested concept during wet lab using two modified Lumera 700 Microscopes with Rescan 700 (Zeiss, Oberkochen). The common question to all surgeons was:
Q1- Are the live OCT scans enhanced?
Additionally, the second group of surgeons answered to the following questions:
Q2- Is there interference with surgical routine?
Q3- Is the temporal consistency of the OCT signal successfully detected?
Q4- Is the processing adequately fast for live OCT scan?
In addition to the subjective tests, 27 recorded OCT scans were analyzed to quantify the achieved improvement based on their contrast to noise ratios (CNR). The CNR value is computed as the difference between the average signals over the foreground and background divided by the standard deviation of the background signal.
Results :
Figure 1 shows examples of the performance of the proposed concept at anterior and posterior sides of the eye as well as the iris-cornea corner. The quantitative analysis showed 11.62 db increase in the contrast to noise ratio of the live OCT by the suggested concept. The YES(Y) or NO(N) answers of the participant surgeons are:
Q1 (6Y 0N)
Q2 (0Y 2N)
Q3 (2Y 0N)
Q4 (2Y 0N)
Conclusions :
The surgeons participating in this study approved the proposed concept. The quantitative and qualitative assessments of the results proved the improvement in the live iOCT scans quality encouraging future research and development to provide better live iOCT images to the surgeons.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.