Basic Study on Diagnostic System of Knee Osteoarthritis Using Doppler OCT

Abstract

We present a novel arthroscopic diagnostic system based on Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography (A-OCDV) to diagnose early osteoarthritis minimal-invasively. This can provide the water permeability tomographically as the doppler modulated frequency. In this experiment, control and collagenase-digested samples of porcine cartilage was applied to A-OCDV with a compression testing machine. The compression and stress relaxation test were subsequently performed using a developed arthroscopic OCT probe, while the continuous tomographic detection of low-coherence interference signals inside sample at the same position was carried out to visualize the doppler velocity tomography. As a result, both of tissue displacement and doppler velocity of collagenase-digested sample were observed to be significantly larger than those of control one, indicating the degraded water permeability depended on visco-elastic failure of cartilage tissue. In summary, the proposed A-OCDV was suggested to have clinically high potential of minimal invasive early OA diagnosis.