Better virtual biopsy technology developed

BOSTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers have developed an optical imaging technique that can provide 3D microscopic views of the inner surfaces of the body's organs.

The technology, developed at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, uses optical frequency-domain imaging, or OFDI, and is an advance over optical coherence tomography, or OCT -- another MGH-developed non-invasive technology.

"For diagnosing early stage disease, the clinician has been basically looking for a needle in a haystack; so sampling only a few microscopic points of an organ, as we could with OCT, is clearly not sufficient," said Brett Bouma, the report's senior author. "With OFDI, we can now perform microscopy throughout very large volumes of tissue without missing any locations."

Inside a fiber optic catheter probe, a constantly rotating laser tip emits a light beam with a changing wavelength, Bouma explained. Measuring how each wavelength is reflected back, as the probe moves through the structure to be imaged, allows rapid acquisition of the data required to create the detailed microscopic images.

The research appears in the early online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.