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.