Optical low-coherence tomography of bronchial tissue

摘要

Abstract: An optical fiber based low coherence interferometer for measuring the Epithelium thickness of Bronchial tissue, for early diagnosis of Carcinoma in situ, is presented. Previous simulation of laser induced fluorescence using an electromagnetic scattering model has extracted the relative permittivity value for the Submucosa and Epithelium layers indicating a difference of up to 0.14. The optical system presented here uses a low coherence source operating at 840 nm with a bandwidth of 30 nm, coupled into single mode optical fiber. A Fizeau cavity is formed between the fiber end and the tissue under investigation. A remote processing interferometer is used to monitor changes in permittivity between the different tissue layers. An initial experiment has demonstrated a sensitivity measurement of 40 dB for a permittivity difference measurement of 0.61. Preliminary results have shown that the discontinuity between the Bronchial Epithelium layer and its surrounding medium can be identified allowing the thickness of the Epithelium layer to be measured to an accuracy of 20 $mu@m. Since interferometric noise contributions are only significant within the processing interferometer, the fiber optic Fizeau interferometer technique is a strong candidate for the development of an endoscope for the early detection of cancer within Gastrointestinal and Respiratory tracts.!4