As an ear surgeon at the QEII Health Sciences Centre, Dr. Manohar Bance spends a lot of time looking at the middle ear.
“That part often goes wrong with chronic disease so some of the bones can get destroyed, they don’t vibrate,” he says. “Disease can arise in there that can be also dangerous and can destroy stuff in front of it.”
Cutting edge technology is giving Dr. Bance a better view of the area.
Optical Coherence Tomography – or OCT – was originally developed for retinal imagine, but a team at the QEII have developed the technology into a microscope to see through the ear drum and into the middle ear.
“We point a laser into the patient’s ear and we look at the reflected light coming back from structures at different depths and from those reflections we’re able to form an image of the structures behind the ear drum,” says researcher Rob Adamson.
Adamson says the OCT system offers a non-invasive way to explore the middle ear.
“For some disorders, the alternative is exploratory surgery,” he explains. “You have to cut the ear drum open to get a look inside and with Optical Coherence Tomography you can look through the ear drum and see what’s inside without having to open the ear drum.”
“It lets us diagnose diseases, it lets us figure out why people are not hearing really well and lets us plan the best kind of surgery for them,” adds Dr. Bance. “It also helps us understand why sometimes after surgery people’s hearing doesn’t improve.”
Dr. Bance says OCT not only makes diagnosing middle ear problems faster and easier, it also offers information surgery cannot.
“Like how much something’s vibrating, if it’s truly fixed or not. We can’t really tell that by just feeling these bones because they’re very micro-nano level vibrations,” says Dr. Bance. “These are things we can only tell by measuring the vibrations.”
The OCT system is currently in clinical trials at the hospital.
Adamson says they’ve seen patients with a number of different disorders and are identifying diseases that can be diagnosed using the technology.
“The next steps for us will be to build a second generation prototype that fixes a lot of the usability issues with the current device and once we’ve got a good handle on what diseases can be diagnosed with the technology, we can start using it as part of the clinical diagnostic procedures.”
