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Spectral/Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

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Optical Coherence Tomography

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Abstract

Optical coherence tomography is a low-coherence interferometric method for imaging of biological tissue [1, 2]. For more than a decade after its inception between 1988 and 1991, the dominant implementation has been time domain OCT (TD-OCT), in which the length of a reference arm is rapidly scanned. The first spectral or Fourier domain OCT (SD/FD-OCT) implementation was reported in 1995 [3]. In SD-OCT the reference arm is kept stationary, and the depth information is obtained by a Fourier transform of the spectrally resolved interference fringes in the detection arm of a Michelson interferometer. This approach has provided a significant advantage in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which despite reports as early as 1997 [4, 5] has taken about half a decade to be recognized fully by the OCT community in 2003 [6–8]. The first demonstration of SD-OCT for in vivo retinal imaging in 2002 [9] was followed by a full realization of the sensitivity advantage by video rate in vivo retinal imaging [10], including high-speed 3-D volumetric imaging [11], ultrahigh-resolution video rate imaging [12, 13], and Doppler blood flow determination in the human retina [14, 15]. The superior sensitivity of SD-OCT, combined with the lack of need for a fast mechanical scanning mechanism, has opened up the possibility of much faster scanning without loss of image quality and provided a paradigm shift from point sampling to volumetric map** of biological tissue in vivo. The technology has been particularly promising for ophthalmology [16, 17]. In this chapter, the principles and system design considerations of SD-OCT will be discussed in more detail.

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Acknowledgment

This research was supported in part by research grants from the National Institutes of Health (1R24 EY12877, R01 EY014975, and RR19768), Department of Defense (F4 9620-01-1-0014), CIMIT, and a gift from Dr. and Mrs. J.S. Chen to the optical diagnostics program of the Wellman Center of Photomedicine. The author would like to thank a number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that have contributed to the results presented in this chapter, Barry Cense, Nader Nassif, Brian White, Hyle Park, Jang Woo You, and Mircea Mujat. Special thanks to Teresa Chen, MD, my invaluable collaborator at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, without whom all this work would not have been possible.

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  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, LaserLaB Amsterdam, Vrije Univ Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Johannes F. de Boer

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  1. Johannes F. de Boer
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Correspondence to Johannes F. de Boer .

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  1. Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University Vienna, General Hospital Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Wolfgang Drexler

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    James G. Fujimoto

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de Boer, J.F. (2015). Spectral/Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography. In: Drexler, W., Fujimoto, J. (eds) Optical Coherence Tomography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06419-2_6

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