University of Colorado Boulder enhances OCT for eye and coronary heart examination

20 Aug 2025

Electrowetting beam-steering prism permits smaller units with out sacrificing efficiency.

Optical coherence tomography is effectively established in ophthalmology clinics as a path to cross-sectional photos of the retina.

The similar know-how is efficacious within the cardiac well being sector, the place intravascular OCT imaging platforms have been created to assist surgeons make personalised choices throughout coronary heart surgical procedure and stent placement.

These purposes profit from miniaturized OCT units, particularly to let imagers match inside endoscopic units and meet constraints on gadget efficiency and energy consumption. But this can be a hurdle for making use of the approach in new purposes or enhancing present ones.

MEMS scanners primarily based on electrostatic and electrothermal actuation have been employed in endoscope-scale OCT platforms to cut back the scale of the gadget and permit a forward-viewing endoscope, though they in flip drive a compromise between scanning pace and drive voltage.

A challenge on the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) has now demonstrated an OCT structure by which an electrowetting beam-steering prism carries out the platform’s lateral scanning operation, a non-mechanical strategy that reduces the facility necessities and complexity.

Described in Optics Express, the brand new structure may result in improved detection of eye and coronary heart situations.

“The benefit of non-mechanical scanning is that you eliminate the need to physically move objects in your device, which reduces any sources of mechanical failure and increases the overall longevity of the device itself,” mentioned CU Boulder’s Samuel Gilinsky.

Critical approach for imaging inside our bodies

The group examined its gadget on zebrafish, animals whose eyes are identified to be related in construction to these of people, and assessed whether or not the modified OCT imager may determine the attention’s cornea, iris and retina tissues at 10 microns axial and 5 microns lateral decision.

“The interesting result was that we were able to actually delineate the cornea and iris in our images,” mentioned Gilinsky. “We were able to meet the resolution targets we aimed for, which was exciting.”

This might open new doorways for mapping features of the retina important for diagnosing potential eye situations like age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma, however CU Boulder additionally envisages electrowetting-based scanners being of profit for forward-facing endoscopes utilized in different purposes, such because the imaging of coronary illness.

“There is a growing push to make endoscopes as small in diameter and flexible as possible to cause as little discomfort as possible,” commented Gilinsky.

“By using our components, we can maintain a very small scale optical system compared to a mechanical scanner that can help OCT technologies. This could be a critical technique for in-vivo imaging inside our bodies.”