Abstract
A review on the technological development of en face optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical coherence microscopy (OCM) is provided. The terminology originally referred to time domain OCT, where the preferential scanning was performed in the en face plane. Potentially the fastest realization of en face image recording is full-field OCT, where the full en face plane is illuminated and recorded simultaneously. The term has nowadays been adopted for high-speed Fourier domain approaches, where the en face image is reconstructed from full 3D volumes either by direct slicing or through axial projection in post processing. The success of modern en face OCT lies in its immediate and easy image interpretation, which is in particular of advantage for OCM or OCT angiography. Applications of en face OCT with a focus on ophthalmology are presented. The review concludes by outlining exciting technological prospects of en face OCT based both on time as well as on Fourier domain OCT.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) [1] provides image slices of tissue with high optical resolution in a non- or minimally invasive manner
The terminology originally referred to time domain optical coherence tomography (OCT), where the preferential scanning was performed in the en face plane
The review concludes by outlining exciting technological prospects of en face OCT based both on time as well as on Fourier domain OCT
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) [1] provides image slices of tissue with high optical resolution in a non- or minimally invasive manner. The carrier frequency itself is not fully constant across the field of view, leading to reduced sensitivity when using a rigid lock-in technique Another drawback is the chromaticity of the phase shift, that might become more relevant for high resolution en face OCT systems [33,34]. A linear stage tunes the reference arm length by a factor of two with regard to the axial displacement of the confocal gate [41] This approximately compensates for the different scaling factors of coherence and confocal gate over the in general small depth penetration range of OCT. Alternative approaches to enhance the focal depth in FDOCT used several light beams focused at different depths [48], Bessel beams [49,50,51,52,53,54] at the expense of sensitivity, or exploited the intrinsic phase stability and speed of FDOCT, and especially of LFOCT and FFOCT, to perform digital refocusing [25,55,56,57,58]
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