Large area full-field optical coherence tomography

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a fundamentally new type of optical imaging technology. OCT performs high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic imaging of the internal structure in materials and biological systems. The biomedical applications of the OCT imaging systems have been developed for diagnostics of ophthalmology, dermatology, dentistry and cardiology. Most of existing OCT systems use point-scanning based technology, however, the 3-axis scanning makes the system slow and cumbersome. A few OCT systems working directly on 2D full-field images were reported, however, they are designed to work in a relatively small area, around couple of hundred microns square. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of a full-field OCT imaging system for acquiring tomography and with a working area around 15mm by 15 mm. The problems rising from full-field OCT are addressed and analyzed. The algorithms to extract the tomography are proposed. Two applications of multilayer information retrieval and 3D object imaging using full-field OCT are described.