Abstract
In the last 25 years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has advanced to be one of the most innovative and most successful translational optical imaging techniques, achieving substantial economic impact as well as clinical acceptance. This is largely owing to the resolution improvements by a factor of 10 to the submicron regime and to the imaging speed increase by more than half a million times to more than 5 million A-scans per second, with the latter one accomplished by the state-of-the-art swept source laser technologies that are reviewed in this article. In addition, parallelization of OCT detection, such as line-field and full-field OCT, has shortened the acquisition time even further by establishing quasi-akinetic scanning. Besides the technical improvements, several functional and contrast-enhancing OCT applications have been investigated, among which the label-free angiography shows great potential for future studies. Finally, various multimodal imaging modalities with OCT incorporated are reviewed, in that these multimodal implementations can synergistically compensate for the fundamental limitations of OCT when it is used alone.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is one of the most innovative and rapidly emerging optical imaging modalities in the last decades[1,2,3,4] because it is capable of perfectly noninvasively exploiting the wealth of morphologic and functional tissue information in the first few millimeters of organs
This review focuses on high-speed technology (SS light technology and parallelization of OCT detection), label-free angiography, and multimodal OCT
Ultrahigh resolution and ultrahigh speed for OCT have been demonstrated on a research level, there is still some time to wait for their commercialization— especially for the latter one
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is one of the most innovative and rapidly emerging optical imaging modalities in the last decades[1,2,3,4] because it is capable of perfectly noninvasively exploiting the wealth of morphologic and functional tissue information in the first few millimeters of organs. The following combinations are reviewed: OCT with multiphoton tomography (MPT, for subcellular resolution); OCT with nonlinear microscopy (for label-free molecular tissue information, cf Sec. 5.1); and OCT with photoacoustic imaging (for enhanced absorption sensitivity and penetration depth—prerequisite 6, cf Sec. 5.2). Previous reviews of OCT focused on advanced screening in the fields of primary care,[53] microscopy,[54] rapid tissue screening,[55] phantoms,[56] high speed,[57] and translational research,[58] while recent application-specific OCT reviews covered ophthalmology,[59,60,61] cardiology,[62,63,64,65,66] dermatology,[67,68,69,70] novel applications in pulmonary medicine,[71] cancer,[72] and optical coherence elastography,[73] as well as OCT post- and signal processing.[74,75] This review focuses on high-speed technology (SS light technology and parallelization of OCT detection), label-free angiography, and multimodal OCT
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