酒石黄清除鼓膜以改善中耳可视化

文献信息

中文摘要

背景： 生物组织本质上会散射光，这限制了光学成像的穿透深度。光学相干断层扫描（OCT）是一种非侵入性、无标记的成像方式，能够以高空间分辨率（<10 µm）生成实时的二维和三维体内图像。虽然OCT已用于早期耳科学研究，以非侵入性诊断中耳炎、区分胆脂瘤与正常中耳黏膜以及识别中耳血管性肿瘤，但鼓膜（TM）的固有光散射限制了OCT的穿透深度。光学清除剂（OCAs）已知可通过减少生物组织细胞和细胞外成分之间的折射率失配来提高光学透明度，从而增加光穿透量。酒石黄（黄色5号）是一种可吸收的FDA批准食品级染料，已被证明可在体内和离体动物模型中使生物组织透明。在本研究中，我们使用定制的1310 nm扫频源OCT系统，研究了酒石黄应用于光学清除人类尸体标本鼓膜的效果。我们证明酒石黄是鼓膜的有效OCA，并改善了OCT成像进入中耳的可视化质量，突出了酒石黄在利用OCT改善中耳病变非侵入性诊断方面的潜在临床应用。

英文摘要

Biological tissues intrinsically scatter light, which limits the depth of penetration of optical imaging. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, label-free imaging modality that generates real-time 2- and 3- dimensional in vivo images with high spatial resolution (<10 µm). While OCT has been used in nascent otologic studies to noninvasively diagnose otitis media, distinguish cholesteatoma from normal middle ear mucosa, and identify vascular tumors of the middle ear, the intrinsic light scattering of the tympanic membrane (TM) limits OCT penetration depth. Optical clearing agents (OCAs) are known to improve optical transparency by decreasing the refractive index mismatch between cellular and extracellular components of biological tissue, thereby increasing the amount of light penetration. Tartrazine (Yellow 5) is an absorbable FDA-approved food-grade dye that has been shown to make biological tissue transparent in in vivo and ex vivo animal models. In this study, we investigated the application of tartrazine to optically clear the TM of human cadaveric specimens using a custom-built 1310 nm swept-source OCT system. We demonstrate that tartrazine is an effective OCA for the TM and improves the quality of visualization for OCT imaging into the middle ear, highlighting the potential clinical application of tartrazine to improve the noninvasive diagnosis of middle ear pathologies using OCT.