Pencil-beam scanning catheter for intracoronary optical coherence tomography

Current gradient-index (GRIN) lens based proximal-driven intracoronary optical coherence tomography (ICOCT) probes consist of a spacer and a GRIN lens with large gradient constant. This design provides great flexibility to control beam profiles, but the spacer length should be well controlled to obtain desired beam profiles and thus it sets an obstacle in mass catheter fabrication. Besides, although GRIN lens with large gradient constant can provide tight focus spot, it has short depth of focus and fast-expanded beam which leads to poor lateral resolution for deep tissue. In this paper, a type of spacer-removed probe is demonstrated with a small gradient constant GRIN lens. This design simplifies the fabrication process and is suitable for mass production. The output beam of the catheter is a narrow nearly collimated light beam, referred to as pencil beam here. The full width at half maximum beam size varies from 35.1 µm to 75.3 µm in air over 3-mm range. Probe design principles are elaborated with probe/catheter fabrication and performance test. The in vivo imaging of the catheter was verified by a clinical ICOCT system. Those results prove that this novel pencil-beam scanning catheter is potentially a good choice for ICOCT systems.