Description
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by airway remodeling, which results in the thickening of airway smooth muscle (ASM) . Patients affected by severe asthma may benefit from bronchial thermoplasty (BT), an endoscopic treatment that targets structural airway remodeling and induces ASM reduction . No diagnostic method is currently available to assess ASM mass, other than invasive airway biopsies. Polarization sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) provides tissue-specific contrast by assessing tissue birefringence which enables ASM detection and quantification . We performed in vivo endoscopic PS-OCT imaging in the lungs periphery of three asthma patients before and after undergoing BT. We demonstrated PS-OCT to be a safe and minimally invasive volumetric imaging technique to visualize and quantify ASM in the airway wall. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a significant ASM reduction after BT is shown by PS-OCT and a correlation between ASM mass in biopsies and in vivo PS-OCT images is found.
