Composition Imaging System for Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography 'Compovision-OCT'

摘要

We have developed an optical coherence tomography system, Compovision-OCT (CV-OCT) that detects lipid for intravascular diagnosis. This system is developed by combining our proprietary Compovision technology, which visualizes the composition of the object using near-infrared light, and optical coherence tomography, which visualizes the cross-sectional tomographic image of the object using interference of light. The main feature of CV-OCT is that it utilizes the near-infrared light in the 1.7 urn wavelength band, which shows an absorption peak of lipid contained in coronary artery plaque. To achieve a performance needed in clinical applications, this system employs a broadband light source based on super-luminescent diodes and spectroscopic line camera. This results in an acquisition rate of 47 kHz per a line of cross-sectional image, and a sensitivity over 100 dB for detecting weak light reflected from the object. We also demonstrate lipid distribution imaging by CV-OCT using an artificial coronary artery plaque model, and confirm the accuracy for lipid detection is more than 90%, which would be sufficiently high for application to plaque diagnosis. This paper presents the feature, configuration, image processing, basic performance of the CV-OCT system and results of evaluation using coronary plaque model.