Microsurgical testicular sperm extraction (micro-TESE) is a surgical procedure that extracts sperm directly from testicular tissue for patients suffering from non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA). A more accurate and non-invasive visualization method is needed for assisting surgeons to increase the success rate and decrease the damage to patients. In this study, we developed a customized spectrum domain optical coherence tomography(SD-OCT) system for visualization of sperm within seminiferous tubules in NOA rat model. Our results show a 92.78% for detection of pockets of sperm, demonstrating the potential for the use of OCT for improved guidance in micro-TESE.
Conventional optical lenses are usually used in OCT systems to perform high lateral resolution imaging. However, the
Gaussian beam profile typically used in OCT links the depth of focus (DOF) to the lateral resolution. We have
experimentally shown that using a cascade system of an ultrasonic virtual tunable optical waveguide (UVTOW) and a
short focal-length lens can provide a large DOF without severely compromising the lateral resolution compared to an
external lens with the same effective focal length. We demonstrate the tunability of the focal length that this system
offers without any need for mechanical perturbation to the imaging setup.
We demonstrate a computationally-efficient optical coherence elastography (OCE) method based on fringe washout. By introducing ultrasound in alternating depth profile, we can obtain information on the mechanical properties of a sample within acquisition of a single image. This can be achieved by simply comparing the intensity in adjacent depth profiles in order to quantify the degree of fringe washout. Phantom agar samples with various densities were measured and quantified by our OCE technique, the correlation to Young’s modulus measurement by atomic force micrscopy (AFM) were observed. Knee cartilage samples of monoiodo acetate-induced arthiritis (MIA) rat models were utilized to replicate cartilage damages where our proposed OCE technique along with intensity and birefringence analyses and AFM measurements were applied. The results indicate that our OCE technique shows a correlation to the techniques as polarization-sensitive OCT, AFM Young’s modulus measurements and histology were promising. Our OCE is applicable to any of existing OCT systems and demonstrated to be computationally-efficient.
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