In vivo imaging of dynamic biological specimen by real-time single-shot full-field optical coherence tomography

Abstract

We demonstrate the feasibility of a compact single-shot full-field time domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) for imaging dynamic biological sample in real-time. The system is based on a Linnik type polarization Michelson interferometer and a four-quadrature phase-stepper optics, which can simultaneously capture four quadraturely phase-stepped interferograms on a single CCD. Using a superluminescent diode as light source with center wavelength of 842nm and spectral width of 16.2nm, the system yields an axial resolution of 19.8μm, and covers a field of view of 280×320μm2 (220×250 pixels) with a transverse resolution of 4.4μm by using a 10× microscope objective (0.3NA). Three-dimensional OCT images of biological samples such as an onion slice and a diaptomus were obtained without any image averaging or pixel binning. In addition, in vivo depth resolved dynamic imaging was demonstrated to show the beating internal structure of a diaptomus with a fame rate of 5fps.