In-vitro and in-vivo imaging of coronary artery stents with Heartbeat OCT

To quantify the impact of cardiac motion on stent length measurements with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and to demonstrate in vivo OCT imaging of implanted stents, without motion artefacts. The study consists of: clinical data evaluation, simulations and in vivo tests. A comparison between OCT-measured and nominal stent lengths in 101 clinically acquired pullbacks was carried out, followed by a simulation of the effect of cardiac motion on stent length measurements, experimentally and computationally. Both a commercial system and a custom OCT, capable of completing a pullback between two consecutive ventricular contractions, were employed. A 13 mm long stent was implanted in the left anterior descending branch of two atherosclerotic swine and imaged with both OCT systems. The analysis of the clinical OCT images yielded an average difference of 1.1 ± 1.6 mm, with a maximum difference of 7.8 mm and the simulations replicated the statistics observed in clinical data. Imaging with the custom OCT, yielded an RMS error of 0.14 mm at 60 BPM with the start of the acquisition synchronized to the cardiac cycle. In vivo imaging with conventional OCT yielded a deviation of 1.2 mm, relative to the length measured on ex-vivo micro-CT, while the length measured in the pullback acquired by the custom OCT differed by 0.20 mm. We demonstrated motion artefact-free OCT-imaging of implanted stents, using ECG triggering and a rapid pullback.