| Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States accounting for 1 of every 4 deaths. A growing percentage of cancers are occurring in the bladder. Of these cancers, a majority originate either on or very near the surface of the bladder wall. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has demonstrated the potential to be of great value in the diagnosis and staging of these cancers due to its high spatial resolution and ability to penetrate up to 2mm in tissue. OCT holds the promise of being an all optical biopsy technique which will greatly reduce the cost of current diagnosis techniques as well as improve the chances of detecting the cancers at an early stage resulting in greatly improved treatment and survival rates. Development of optical components that are small and robust enough to fit in the accessory port of a cystoscope is critical to the clinical success of OCT in bladder cancer imaging.;In this work, a novel method of fabricating a 2-D microelectromechanical system (MEMS) mirror for use in endoscopic OCT (EOCT) is presented. The proposed device was designed, modeled, and built for use in EOCT applications. The fabrication methodologies utilized common MEMS processing tools to create devices that can be fabricated inexpensively and in most MEMS foundries. The resulting devices are capable of being used in existing endoscopic probes to create a 2-D OCT image of tissue. The successfully fabricated devices have been packaged and images have been made using several different types of OCT systems. |
