Strain-based optical coherence elastography (OCE) is a functional imaging modality derived from optical coherence tomography (OCT), which evaluates biomechanical properties by measuring tissue strain. However, conventional Doppler phase-based strain estimation is highly susceptible to phase wrapping, particularly under conditions of unstable scanning speed, which is often exacerbated by non-uniform rotational distortion (NURD) in proximally driven endoscopic probes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a distal rotary scanning endoscopic OCE system integrated with a balloon catheter. By combining balloon inflation-induced excitation with circumferential scanning, the system enables stable and uniform elastography imaging of intestinal tissue while mitigating NURD-related artifacts. Displacement fields are estimated by calculating inter-frame phase differences of OCT images, based on which radial strain maps are reconstructed, thereby simplifying the phase-unwrapping process. Experiments conducted on tissue-mimicking phantoms and ex vivo porcine intestines confirm the feasibility of the proposed method. The results indicate that the system can simultaneously capture high-resolution structural images and radial strain information from localized intestinal tissues, demonstrating significant potential for clinical applications in the early diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of intestinal diseases.
Fang et al. (2026) studied this question.