Heartbeat OCT is a method developed by Tianshi Wang et al. to generate intravascular OCT images [1]. In conventional intravascular OCT, a catheter is inserted into an artery, slowly pulled back and OCT images are generated during the procedure. This is done over many cardiac cycles, resulting in motion artifacts. In Heartbeat OCT, the catheter tip contains a focusing unit with a mirror attached to a motor. With the help of a FDML laser developed by AG-Huber with a tuning rate of 2.88 MHz (4000 frames/s) and the fast rotating motor in the catheter tip, an artery with a length of 50mm can be recorded within 0.5s within a single heart cycle. This significantly reduces motion artifacts, distortion and subsampling.
[1] Tianshi Wang, Tom Pfeiffer et al., "Heartbeat OCT: in vivo intravascular megahertz-optical coherence tomography," Biomed. Opt. Express 6, 5021-5032 (2015)
