Concurrent Multi-scale Imaging: Optical Coherence Tomography under MRI Guidance for Neurosurgery

We developed a novel platform based on a teleoperated robot to perform high-resolution optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging under continuous MRI guidance. The combination of large-scale MRI tissue morphology and high-resolution OCT micro-architecture in a concurrent and co-registered manner has great potential to improve the accuracy of various neurosurgical procedures. In this study, we developed the first MRI-compatible OCT imaging system. We demonstrated that a thin OCT fiber probe (0.23 mm) integrated within surgical tools can provide microstructure information from the ROI under continuous MRI guidance. We tested the system's performance on chicken breast and simulated stereotactic neurosurgery on human brain ex vivo.