Methods to quantify airway wall compliance are needed for diagnostics, stratification, and monitoring in upper airway disorders and inhalation injury. Endoscopic OCT tracks micron-scale airway deformation during respiration, and in conjunction with in situ pressure monitoring, maps local and cross-sectional compliances. Airway phantoms are employed to validate the accuracy of the methods, and experiments in ex vivo and in vivo pig airways are compared to CINE CT. Findings include the importance of centroid tracking, best practices for endoscopic procedures, hysteresis in airway pressure-volume curves, changes in elastic properties during burn injury, and modeling methods to extract elasticity and viscoelasticity.
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