Research On Key Technologies Of Handheld Oral OCT Imaging

Oral diseases such as oral cancer are commonly detected at a late stage,leading to untimely treatment,even resulting in death.Therefore,it is very important to develop effective imaging tools for early diagnosis of oral diseases.As a new biomedical optical imaging technology,optical coherence tomography(OCT)has the advantages of being noninvasive,and having high-resolution,fast imaging speed,and high sensitivity,demonstrating great potential in the early diagnosis of oral diseases.In this thesis,the key problems about the development of a hand-held OCT oral imaging system were investigated.First of all,in order to make the system suitable for imaging of various forms of oral tissue,4f optical system and lateral imaging structure were combined in the optical path of the sample arm.Second,a hand-held imaging probe was then realized by a compact optical path design of sample arm through determining the accurate distances between adjacent faces of lenses by simulating performance of the system through tracing the optical path with Zemax,designing the mechanical structure with Solidworks and printing it with 3D printer.The developed hand-held probe can not only image any interested oral structures in vivo,but also reduce the pressure on the operator during the imaging process due to its small size and light weight,which effectively removes the imaging artifacts caused by the operator's motion.Finally,the structural images and microvascular images of the biological samples were successfully reconstructed with our hand-held probe and the improved DSDLI algorithm,demonstrating the feasibility of the system for the early diagnosis of oral diseases by the real-time in vivo imaging of human oral tissue at early time.