An integrated therapeutic and imaging device that uses at least two balloons to provide a guarded zone that can be evacuated and replaced with a fluid that is sufficiently clear to permit optical coherence tomography (or even high resolution ultrasound) imaging that would otherwise be of poor quality or impossible. Methods of making and operating the imaging device to obtain clear, high quality images, as well as treating a patient's tissue with the device within a living body in association with obtaining an image of the patient's tissue, are included.
