JohnAm wrote:Dr S,
An acquaintance attended a seminar at the local university hospital last month and the dr/researcher cardiologist talked about NIRS as a new technique or modality in addition to IVUS.
Could NIRS be of value in your work and CCSVI armamentarium?
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JohnAm, interesting question. NIRS stands for a few things, including
nuclear information and resource system, a group dedicated to reduction in radiation exposure. the answer is yes, any radation exposure reductino is of value to us
2. National Institute on Retirement Security. The answer is yes, at least to me, as i am now more than 65 years of age
3. Near InfraRed Spectroscopy,, the answer is yes. The main imaging technique using NIRS is optical coherence tomography (OCT). This imaging technique captures and measures optical light scatter within tissue. Resolution is very high, and can be less than a micron. However it is a surface imager as it does not penetrate more than a few millimeters into the tissue. It has mainly been used for analysis by imaging of the eye, notably the retina. It has recently been used in a manner similar to IVUS in studying the surface of coronary arteries and to look for lipid rich plaques in arteries. . I investigated possible use in my patients last year. Unfortunately, the device currently available is for small arteries such as coronary arteries which are only a few millimeters in diameter. It may well allow better visualization of the surface of thin structures such as valves, but the field of view currently available would not allow good visualization of the large veins we look at in ccsvi.
The higher resolution new IVUS currently undergoing investigation under FDA supervision would provide the higher resolution that might be beneficial in evaluating the veins of ccsvi.. At the current time, neither method is currently practical for us