Synchronous multimodal combination of full-field OCT and structured illumination fluorescence microscopy (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

FF-OCT is a full field high transverse resolution version of temporal domain OCT. It acquires En-face images with an isotropic 3D submicronic resolution deep inside a biological tissue. It can access an optical contrast at a given depth, meaning that FF-OCT is sensitive to variations of optical index. FF-OCT can thus probe the microarchitecture of a tissue without label. However, Ff-OCT lacks of specific molecular contrast. On the contrary, Fluorescence microscopy can reveal labelled molecules with a very good specificity. Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) is a technique providing optical sectioning to fluorescence widefield microscopy. However, this technique can be complicated to implement in a tissue, and fails at providing environmental information. Therefore, combining FF-OCT and SIM has many advantages and adds a specific molecular contrast to a microarchitecture image of a biological sample. Combining FF-OCT and SIM has already been reported in the literature. Here, we report on the development of different way to combine FF-OCT and SIM. On the contrary to previously described setups, our setup enables the synchronous detection of both modalities. We believe this is important to access to dynamical events that take place in tissues. With such a technique, we are able to detect fast changes happening both in the environment, and in the behavior of a specific molecule. For now, we applied our technique to detect static structural information in the cornea. By the time of the conference, we expect to use our system to detect dynamical changes in a tissue.