The most flexible swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) engine, coupled with an ophthalmic surgical microscope, operating at MHz A-scan rates, is presented to the best of our knowledge. Application-specific imaging modes, which encompass diagnostic and documentary capture scans, live B-scan visualizations, and real-time 4D-OCT renderings, are achieved through the use of a MEMS tunable VCSEL. A presentation of the technical design and implementation of the SS-OCT engine, along with the reconstruction and rendering platform, is provided. Surgical mock maneuvers with ex vivo bovine and porcine eye models facilitate the evaluation of all imaging modes. The discussion centers on the applicability and restrictions of MHz SS-OCT for ophthalmic surgical visualization.
The noninvasive technique, diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), offers promise for monitoring cerebral blood flow and measuring cortical functional activation tasks. The heightened sensitivity achieved through parallel measurements is frequently hampered by scalability limitations inherent in discrete optical detectors. Our findings indicate that the combination of a 500×500 SPAD array and sophisticated FPGA design produces an SNR gain that is nearly 500 times greater than that observed with single-pixel mDCS. Reconfiguring the system to decrease correlation bin width, potentially at the cost of SNR, showcased 400 nanosecond resolution across 8000 pixels.
Differences in spinal fusion accuracy are largely attributable to variations in the experience of the medical practitioner. Through the application of real-time tissue feedback via diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, cortical breach detection has been achieved using a conventional probe with two parallel fiber arrangements. Tissue Culture This study utilized Monte Carlo simulations and optical phantom experiments to analyze how the angulation of the emitting fiber impacts the probed volume, enabling the detection of acute breaches. The disparity in intensity magnitude between cancellous and cortical spectra amplified as the fiber angle increased, implying that outward-angled fibers are advantageous in acute breach situations. The identification of cortical bone's proximity was most successful using fibers with a 45-degree angle (f = 45), vital during potential breaches occurring within pressure values from 0 to 45 (p). This orthopedic surgical device, characterized by the addition of a third fiber perpendicular to its axis, would therefore be capable of covering the complete impending breach range, spanning from p = 0 to p = 90.
PDT-SPACE, an open-source software tool, automates interstitial photodynamic therapy treatment planning, tailoring light source placement to individual patient needs, aiming to destroy tumors while preserving healthy tissue. This work contributes two extensions to PDT-SPACE. To mitigate surgical intricacy and avoid piercing critical structures, the first enhancement enables specifying clinical access restrictions on light source insertion. Restricting fiber entry to a solitary burr hole of suitable dimensions exacerbates healthy tissue damage by 10%. The second enhancement automates the initial placement of light sources, a starting point for refinement, thereby freeing the clinician from inputting a starting solution. Productivity is boosted and healthy tissue damage is reduced by 45% with this feature as a solution. These two features are utilized in conjunction to conduct simulations of diverse surgical alternatives for virtual glioblastoma multiforme brain tumors.
Progressive corneal thinning and the development of a cone-shaped protrusion, specifically at the apex of the cornea, are defining characteristics of keratoconus, a non-inflammatory ectatic disease. Recent years have seen an increasing trend of researchers becoming engaged with automatic and semi-automatic knowledge center (KC) detection processes, employing corneal topography. Even though understanding KC severity grading is essential for appropriate KC therapies, the corresponding research base is remarkably thin. We present a lightweight knowledge component grading network (LKG-Net) to assess knowledge components across four severity levels: Normal, Mild, Moderate, and Severe. Employing depth-wise separable convolutions, we develop a novel feature extraction block based on the self-attention mechanism. This block excels in extracting rich features while effectively reducing redundant information, leading to a significant decrease in the model's parameter count. A multi-level feature fusion module is suggested for better model performance, by integrating features from both upper- and lower-level structures, yielding more abundant and potent features. Using a 4-fold cross-validation method, the performance of the proposed LKG-Net was evaluated on the corneal topography of 488 eyes from 281 individuals. Distinguished from other state-of-the-art classification methods, the presented methodology achieved weighted recall (WR) of 89.55%, weighted precision (WP) of 89.98%, weighted F1 score (WF1) of 89.50%, and a Kappa score of 94.38%, respectively. The LKG-Net's performance is additionally tested using knowledge component (KC) screening, and the experimental outcomes demonstrate its effectiveness.
Retina fundus imaging, a patient-friendly and efficient diagnostic modality, easily allows for the acquisition of multiple high-resolution images, thereby ensuring an accurate diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR). In locations where certified human experts are scarce, data-driven models, employing deep learning advancements, may significantly enhance the process of high-throughput diagnosis. Existing datasets are plentiful for training models aimed at identifying diabetic retinopathy. Still, the majority often show an imbalance, lacking a substantial enough sample count, or a conjunction of these problems. Utilizing either artificially generated or freely drawn semantic lesion maps, this paper outlines a two-stage pipeline for producing photorealistic retinal fundus images. A conditional StyleGAN model is applied in the initial phase to generate synthetic lesion maps, which are directly contingent upon the severity grade of diabetic retinopathy. The second stage of the process then uses GauGAN to transform the generated synthetic lesion maps into high-resolution fundus images. Through the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) metric, we analyze the photorealism of generated images and showcase the pipeline's practical application in downstream tasks, such as data augmentation to automatically assess diabetic retinopathy and segment lesions.
Real-time label-free tomographic imaging is facilitated by optical coherence microscopy (OCM), enabling biomedical researchers to achieve high resolution. Unfortunately, OCM lacks bioactivity-related functional contrast. To measure variations in intracellular motility, signifying cellular states, we established an OCM system that leverages pixel-level calculations of intensity fluctuations, which are induced by metabolic activity of intracellular parts. For noise reduction in images, the source spectrum is separated into five parts with Gaussian windows that each take up 50% of the full width at half maximum of the spectrum. The technique demonstrated that Y-27632's action on F-actin fibers resulted in a decrease of intracellular movement. Therapeutic strategies for cardiovascular diseases involving intracellular motility could be identified using this finding.
The collagen structure within the vitreous humor is crucial for maintaining the mechanics of the eye. Still, the current vitreous imaging techniques face a barrier in representing this structural pattern due to the loss of precise sample position and orientation, and limitations in resolution and the field of view. The goal of this investigation was to explore confocal reflectance microscopy as a viable solution for these shortcomings. Intrinsic reflectance, mitigating the effect of staining, and optical sectioning, which eliminates the need for thin sectioning, both streamline the sample preparation process, leading to optimal preservation of the specimen's inherent structure. Ex vivo grossly sectioned porcine eyes were used to develop a sample preparation and imaging strategy. The imaging procedure revealed a network of fibers with a uniform diameter (1103 meters in a typical image), showing generally inadequate alignment (alignment coefficient of 0.40021 in a typical image). Our method's utility in discerning differences in the spatial distribution of fibers was evaluated by imaging eyes at 1-millimeter intervals along an anterior-posterior axis, starting from the limbus, and subsequently determining the fiber count within each image. Imaging plane differences notwithstanding, a greater fiber density existed near the vitreous base, specifically in the anterior section. find more Confocal reflectance microscopy, as demonstrated by these data, fulfills the previously unmet requirement for a robust, micron-scale technique capable of in situ mapping of collagen network features throughout the vitreous.
Ptychography, an enabling microscopy technique, profoundly impacts both fundamental and applied scientific fields. For the duration of the last ten years, this imaging technique has become an absolute requirement, prevalent in most X-ray synchrotrons and national laboratories across the world. The limited resolution and data generation rate of ptychography in the visible light domain have restricted its widespread utilization within biomedical research. Developments in this methodology have eliminated these issues, offering fully functional solutions for high-throughput optical imaging with a minimum of hardware modifications. The demonstrated imaging throughput has now shown to be faster than that of a high-end whole slide scanner. non-infective endocarditis We examine the core concept of ptychography and trace the progression of its development in this review. Ptychography's diverse implementations are organized into four groups, dependent on their lens-based or lensless configurations and their use of coded illumination or coded detection. Beyond that, we elaborate upon the related biomedical applications, including digital pathology, drug screening, urine analysis, blood examination, cytometric analysis, rare cell detection, cell culture observation, two-dimensional and three-dimensional visualization of cells and tissues, polarimetric evaluation, and numerous other relevant procedures.