Setting Sights on a Silent Killer
Coronary artery disease is a killer that works at the cellular level. Heart attacks occur when the endothelium of a vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque is disrupted. The ability to determine which patient has a “vulnerable” plaque that is going to rupture—causing a deadly heart attack—is determined by the pathologist, through a microsope, after the rupture has occurred. Clearly, it would benefit the patient to track down these vulnerable plaques before rupture. To this end, Liu and colleagues present a new form of optical coherence tomography (OCT), called micro-optical coherence tomography (µOCT). µOCT boasts 1- to 2-µm resolution, which allows ...
Read Full Article
Mentions:
University of Chicago
