Intracoronary Optical Frequency Domain Imaging for Identifying Stent-Related Complications

Percutaneous coronary intervention is the most common treatment of coronary artery disease with the majority of cases undergoing stent implantation. Furthermore, adequate stent deployment is of primary importance to avoid late stent thrombosis and achieve a favorable clinical outcome. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new imaging modality that utilizes advanced photonics and fiberoptics to obtain intravascular images on a microscopic scale. Today, many new drug-eluting stents (DES) are now undergoing clinical trials. Moreover, the intricacies of stent design, local pharmacology, tissue biology, and rheology preclude an intuitive understanding of usability of DES. After stent implantation, assessment should include both the acute and chronic stent/vessel-related changes which include stent malapposition, tissue prolapse, edge dissections, and thrombus formation. OCT plays an indispensable part in determining mechanistic information on the relevance of these phenomena among each DES that cannot be covered by several other modalities.