OCT Considered a Powerful Tool to Evaluate the Quality of the Bronchial ThermoplastySurgery

Guangzhou, China – Aug 20, 2015 – Tomophase Incorporation, a leading developer of minimally invasive optical coherence tomography (OCT) tissue imaging devices, announced today that the strategic collaborator Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases (GIRD), orallypresented preliminary data of utilizing OCTISTM in the evaluation of bronchial thermoplasty in severe asthma in last week’s 18th Guangdong Province Conferenceof Respiratory Diseases in Jiangmen, China. The group led by Dr. Shiye Li also published an abstract on the topic in the conference proceedings, kindly please see below for the English translation of the abstract as well as the original in Chinese.

OCT Evaluation of Airway Morphological Changes Before and After Bronchial Thermoplasty in Severe Asthma Patients Ming Ding, Yu Chen, ChanggaoZhong, Shiyue Li.

Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510010.

Background and objectives:Bronchial thermoplasty (BT) is an emerging physical therapy for patients with severe asthma, using thermal energy to reduce airway smooth muscle mass, and thus alleviating the symptoms of asthma. This study was designed to investigate the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to detect airway changes before and after BT in asthma patients, and evaluate the quality of ablation.Method: Three BT treatments were successfully carried out in each of 5 patients. Airway diameter (D), airway inner area (Ai) and airway wall area (Aw) were measured with OCT before and after BT, and the percentage of Aw over the total area (Aw% = Aw / (Aw + Ai)%) calculated, so that the ablation of airway smooth muscle could be evaluated.Results: BT treatments were successfully completed in all patients, without any significant complication. Bland-Altman plot suggested that after simple training two physicians reached statistically significant agreement in using OCT to evaluate the quality of ablation. And significant improvement (p<0.05) in the airway morphological parameters (D, Ai, Aw and Aw%)was observed post-BT. Conclusion: OCT is a powerful tool to evaluate the quality of the BT surgery.