Analysis and evaluation of BC-mode OCT image visualization for microsurgery guidance

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Imaging
• Microsurgery Technology
• Optical Coherence Tomography

Background:

• B-mode OCT struggles with continuous surgical tool tracking and suffers from shadow effects.
• C-mode OCT offers slow imaging speeds at high resolution or poor resolution at high speeds.
• 3D rendering in C-mode OCT hinders visualization of subsurface tissue and tool tracking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an improved OCT imaging method for enhanced visualization in image-guided microsurgery.
• To address the limitations of B-mode and C-mode OCT in tracking surgical tools and visualizing subsurface structures.

Main Methods:

• Proposed a novel BC-mode OCT image visualization method utilizing a sparse C-scanning scheme.
• Acquired a set of high-resolution B-mode OCT images at sparsely spaced cross-sections.
• Averaged image sets with inter-frame variance processing to enhance surgical tool and tissue layer signals.

Main Results:

• BC-mode OCT provides superior visualization of both surgical tools and tissue structures compared to conventional B- or C-mode OCT.
• Demonstrated improved image resolution, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), imaging speed, and surgical tool tracking accuracy.
• Successfully guided freehand needle insertion into an ex-vivo human eye cornea.

Conclusions:

• The proposed BC-mode OCT method offers significant advantages for image-guided microsurgery.
• This technique enhances the visualization capabilities crucial for precise surgical interventions.
• BC-mode OCT represents a feasible advancement for improving microsurgical procedures.