Application of compression optical coherence elastography for characterization of human pericardium: A pilot study

Abstract

The recent impressive progress in Compression Optical Coherence Elastography (C‐OCE) demonstrated diverse biomedical applications, comprising ophthalmology, oncology, etc. High resolution of C‐OCE enables spatially resolved characterization of elasticity of rather thin (thickness < 1 mm) samples, which previously was impossible. Besides Young's modulus, C‐OCE enables obtaining of nonlinear stress–strain dependences for various tissues. Here, we report the first application of C‐OCE to nondestructively characterize biomechanics of human pericardium, for which data of conventional tensile tests are very limited and controversial. C‐OCE revealed pronounced differences among differently prepared pericardium samples. Ample understanding of the influence of chemo‐mechanical treatment on pericardium biomechanics is very important because of rapidly growing usage of own patients' pericardium for replacement of aortic valve leaflets in cardio‐surgery. The figure demonstrates differences in the tangent Young's modulus after glutaraldehyde‐induced cross‐linking for two pericardium samples. One sample was over‐stretched during the preparation, which caused some damage to the tissue.

Optical coherence elastography and its applications for the biomechanical characterization of tissues

“…OCE can evaluate the elasticity of biological tissues, such as the cornea [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65], the lens [66][67][68], the retina [69], the artery [30], the tumor [15,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77], the brain [78], the skin [28], and some other tissues [79][80][81][82], providing new evidence for clinical research. This section presents a few recent applications in ophthalmology, endoscopy, and oncology.…”

In situ stress estimation in quantitative micro-elastography

“…QME has shown promise in many applications, most notably in breast tumor margin assessment [ 19 , 20 ] and mechanobiology [ 21 – 23 ]. Separately, a related technique that performs 2-D elasticity imaging at a series of pre-strains has also been proposed [ 24 – 26 ].…”

Optical coherence elastography with osmotically induced strains: Preliminary demonstration for express detection of cartilage degradation

“…In this paper, we report the first results on the utilization of OCT-based visualization and quantification of parameters of osmotic processes in ex vivo experiments with cartilage samples for express evaluation of the progress of cartilage degradation. Cartilage is significantly stiffer than other soft biotissues, such as breast tissues (like in studies [15,16]), or cornea [10,27], or pericardium [28]. Unlike those tissues, compression OCE based on visualization of mechanically produced strains may not be so well-suitable for studying the biomechanics of fairly stiff cartilage.…”