Song Ge, Chu Kengyeh K, Kim Sanghoon, Crose Michael, Cox Brian, Jelly Evan T, Ulrich J Niklas, Wax Adam
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Kittner Eye Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Transl Vis Sci Technol. 2019 Jun 28;8(3):61. doi: 10.1167/tvst.8.3.61. eCollection 2019 May.
We present the design of a new low-cost optical coherence tomography (OCT) system and compare its retinal imaging capabilities to a standard commercial system through a clinical study.
A spectral-domain OCT system was designed using various cost-reduction techniques to be low-cost, highly portable, and completely stand-alone. Clinical imaging was performed on 120 eyes of 60 patients (60 eyes of normal volunteers and 60 eyes with retinal disease) using both the low-cost OCT and a Heidelberg Engineering Spectralis OCT. Contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) was measured from resulting images to determine system performance.
The low-cost OCT system was successfully applied to clinical imaging of the retina. The system offers an axial resolution of 8.0 μm, a lateral resolution of 19.6 μm, and an imaging depth of 2.7 mm for a 6.6-mm field of view in the X and Y directions. Total cost is $5037, a significant size reduction compared to current commercial higher performance systems. Mean CNR value of low-cost OCT images is only 5.6% lower compared to the Heidelberg Spectralis.
The images captured with the low-cost OCT were of adequate resolution and allowed for clinical diagnostics. It offers comparable performance as a retinal screening tool at a fraction of the cost of current commercial systems.
Low-cost OCT has the potential to increase access to retinal imaging.
我们展示一种新型低成本光学相干断层扫描（OCT）系统的设计，并通过一项临床研究将其视网膜成像能力与标准商业系统进行比较。
设计了一种光谱域OCT系统，采用各种降低成本的技术，使其具有低成本、高度便携且完全独立的特点。使用低成本OCT和海德堡工程公司的Spectralis OCT对60例患者的120只眼睛（60只正常志愿者眼睛和60只患有视网膜疾病的眼睛）进行临床成像。从所得图像中测量对比度噪声比（CNR）以确定系统性能。
低成本OCT系统成功应用于视网膜临床成像。该系统在X和Y方向上6.6毫米的视野范围内，轴向分辨率为8.0微米，横向分辨率为19.6微米，成像深度为2.7毫米。总成本为5037美元，与目前商业上更高性能的系统相比，尺寸显著减小。低成本OCT图像的平均CNR值仅比海德堡Spectralis低5.6%。
用低成本OCT采集的图像具有足够的分辨率，可用于临床诊断。作为一种视网膜筛查工具，它提供了与现有商业系统相当的性能，但成本仅为其几分之一。
低成本OCT有可能增加视网膜成像的可及性。
