Safety and usefulness of non-occlusion image acquisition technique for optical coherence tomography.

BACKGROUND Because optical coherence tomography (OCT) requires balloon-occlusion to overcome image attenuation by blood, the present study investigated the safety and usefulness of a new non-occlusive technique. METHODS AND RESULTS The 40 angina patients were assigned to the continuous-flushing method or the balloon-occlusion method group. The continuous-flushing method was superior for observing proximal lesions compared with the balloon-occlusion method (94% vs 55%, p=0.01). There were no differences between groups in the visible length and image quality. There were no major complications during OCT. CONCLUSIONS The continuous-flushing method is safe and useful for OCT.