Development of SD-OCT for imaging the in vivo human tympanic membrane

We report a novel extension of 840 nm wavelength- based spectral domain optical tomography to in vivo/real-time human middle ear diagnosis. The system was designed to access the middle ear region with a specifically dedicated handheld probe. The real-time displaying feature was mandatory for in vivo imaging human subject with the handheld probe, and the system could provide about 20 frames per second for 2048 pixels by 1000 A-scans without using any graphics process units under the Lab view platform. The inner ear structure of a healthy male volunteer was imaged with the developed system with the axial and lateral resolutions of 15 μm and 30 μm, respectively. The application of the OCT technology to early diagnose otitis media (OM) is very promising and could be another extensive branch in the OCT field because it provides the depth resolved image including tympanic membrane (TM) and structures below TM whereas the conventional otoscope technique only gives a surface image of the TM.