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Optical
Imaging Technique for Angioplasty
Newswise, August 2010 — A new optical
imaging technique described in the journal Review
of Scientific Instruments, which is
published by the American Institute of
Physics, holds the potential to greatly
improve angioplasty, a surgery commonly
performed to treat patients with a partially
or completely blocked coronary artery that
restricts blood flow to the heart.
Angioplasty involves threading a slender,
balloon-tipped tube from an artery in the
groin to the trouble spot in the artery of
the heart. The balloon is then inflated to
compress the plaque that is blocking the
artery. These balloons can also be used to
deploy a stent, which is a wire-mesh tube
sometimes inserted into the artery during an
angioplasty procedure to keep it open and
prevent reblockage.
In both cases, an optimal balloon design is
critical to the success of an operation.
Balloons can now be tested in a balloon
deployment tester equipped with a system to
monitor the outer diameter of the balloon,
according to Guy Lamouche, research officer
at the National Research Council of Canada.
With the goal of improving balloon
deployment, the researchers investigated
obtaining a more precise monitoring of
balloon inflation by combining a deployment
tester with an optical coherence tomography
(OCT) imaging system. OCT allows imaging
over a depth of a few millimeters in a
tissue or material. By performing a pullback
(rotation and translation) of a catheter OCT
probe in a balloon, they discovered that
it's possible to obtain a precise
measurement of the balloon's diameter and
thickness over the entire balloon.
"Combining OCT with a balloon deployment
system provides an improved platform for
angioplasty balloon development and can also
be used in the development of
next-generation minimally invasive devices
for percutaneous -- through the skin --
coronary interventions," says Lamouche.
"It's now possible to monitor balloon
inflation within an artery phantom (model)
or an excised artery to assess the
efficiency of innovative balloon angioplasty
or stent deployment procedures."
The article, "Optical coherence tomography
monitoring of angioplasty balloon inflation
in a deployment tester" by Hamed Azarnoush,
Sebastien Vergnole, Rafik Bourezak, Benoit
Boulet, and Guy Lamouche will appear in the
journal Review of Scientific Instruments.
