A blockage of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) on the cortical branch will seriously affect the blood supply of the cerebral cortex. Real-time monitoring of MCA hemodynamic parameters is critical for therapy and rehabilitation. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful imaging modality that can produce not only structural images but also functional information on the tissue. We use OCT to detect hemodynamic changes after MCA branch occlusion. We injected a selected dose of endothelin-1 (ET-1) at a depth of 1 mm near the MCA and let the blood vessels follow a process first of occlusion and then of slow reperfusion as realistically as possible to simulate local cerebral ischemia. During this period, we used optical microangiography and Doppler OCT to obtain multiple hemodynamic MCA parameters. The change trend of these parameters from before to after ET-1 injection clearly reflects the dynamic regularity of the MCA. These results show the mechanism of the cerebral ischemia-reperfusion process after a transient middle cerebral artery occlusion and confirm that OCT can be used to monitor hemodynamic parameters.
Cerebral edema is a severe complication of acute ischemic stroke with high mortality but limited treatment. Although parameters such as brain water content and intracranial pressure may represent the global assessment of edema, optical properties can appear heterogeneously throughout the cerebral tissue relative to the site of injury. In this study, we have monitored the edema formation and progression in both permanent and transient middle cerebral artery occlusion models in rats. Edema was reflected by the decrease of optical attenuation coefficient (OAC) value in OCT system. By utilizing swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT), we found that in photochemically induced permanent focal stroke model, both the edema size and edema index, steadily developed until the end of monitor (7[Formula: see text]h). Comparatively, when transient ischemia was introduced with endothelin-1 (ET-1), the edema was detected as early as 15[Formula: see text]min, and began to recover after 30[Formula: see text]min until monitor was finished (3[Formula: see text]h). Despite the majority of the edema being recovered to some extent, the condition of a small region within the edema kept deteriorating, presumably due to the reperfusion damage which might result in serious clinical outcomes. Our study has compared the edema characteristics from two different acute ischemic stroke situations. This work not only confirms the capability of OCT to temporal and spatial monitor of edema but is also able to locate focal conditions at some areas that might highly determine the prognosis and treatment decisions.
Segmentation of layers in retinal images obtained by optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become an important clinical tool to diagnose ophthalmic diseases. However, due to the susceptibility to speckle noise and shadow of blood vessels etc., the layer segmentation technology based on a single image still fail to reach a satisfactory level. We propose a combination method of structure interpolation and lateral mean filtering (SI-LMF) to improve the signal-to-noise ratio based on one retinal image. Before performing one-dimensional lateral mean filtering to remove noise, structure interpolation was operated to eliminate thickness fluctuations. Then, we used boundary growth method to identify boundaries. Compared with existing segmentations, the method proposed in this paper requires less data and avoids the influence of microsaccade. The automatic segmentation method was verified on the spectral domain OCT volume images obtained from four normal objects, which successfully identified the boundaries of 10 physiological layers, consistent with the results based on the manual determination.
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