Novelties in cardiac imaging -Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)

Introduction
In order to improve our understanding of late stent thrombosis and to assess the individual risk of a patient or lesion, there is clinical need to assess vascular healing after stenting in vivo. We will discuss the potential and limitations of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for imaging of drug eluting stents (DES).
OCT, a light based imaging modality, has recently become available for intracoronary application. Because of the shorter wavelength of infrared light compared to ultrasound, OCT has a ten-fold higher image resolution than conventional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), 150 micron for IVUS as compared to 15 micron for OCT. This advantage renders OCT particularly useful for the assessment of coronary stents.