LAUSR

The successful surgery of chronic otitis media (COM) is challenging; this depends on the surgeon's knowledge of the optical visibility of surgical microscopes. Herein, we reported the utilization of intra-surgical optical coherence tomography (OCT) system to effectively guide the surgery of COM based on augmented reality with cross-sectional images. The intra-surgical spectral-domain OCT system with a center wavelength of 846 nm was capable of obtaining non-invasive, high-resolution, and high-speed visualizations with an axial resolution of 8 ${{\bf \mu }}$m, lateral resolution of 30 ${{\bf \mu }}$m, and an extended working distance of 280 mm. Three patients with COM were involved in this research. The lesion conditions of the temporal bone were observed with computed tomography pre-operatively. Furthermore, pure-tone audiogram examinations were performed to evaluate pre and post-surgical conditions. The results revealed that the averaged air-bone gap of 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz, and 4 kHz in all cases improved to 61%. Thus, the research proves that the experimental procedure can be beneficial and clinically applicable with the developed intra-surgical OCT system for future otolaryngological assessments.