抄録
Tissue vulnerability diagnosis of atherosclerotic plaques has been being required, because the rupture of unstable plaque on coronary artery should cause acute coronary syndromes. 3-Dimensional Optical Coherence Straingraphy (3D-OCSA) is proposed, which can visualize tissue mechanical information, e.g. strain distribution, from speckle deformation between synthetic 3-dementional images obtained by Optical Coherence Tomography. This is basically constructed by Recursive 3-dementional FFT Cross-correlation as well as Image Deformation technique which take account of linear deformation of interrogation volume. Finally Weighted Moving Least Square Method can provide tomographic tissue strain distribution with high resolution. In this study, 3D-OCSA was ex vivo applied to plaque lesions in WHHL rabbit aorta, according to the validation result using artificial phantoms of atherosclerotic plaque. Consequently, Residual negative strain distributions identified the accumulation of lipid tissue having low elastic modulus, which was qualitatively analogous to histological images and FEM simulation results. It was concluded that 3D-OCSA could be highly effective to clinical assessment of atherosclerosis as "Micro Mechanical Biopsy".
