Fourier domain optical coherence tomography for imaging of biological tissues

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new imaging modality that is being actively used in a variety of medical applications. Currently, most of the OCT systems operate in the time domain, which requires scanning the optical path length in the reference arm in order to obtain the in-depth profile, i.e. A scan. This however limits the system scanning speed. To avoid the axial scanning and therefore improve the system scanning speed, a novel OCT system is recently proposed by a number of groups that operates in the frequency domain, i.e. the spectral OCT. In this paper, we report the spectral OCT system being constructed at Tianjin University. The system has a dynamic range at 78dB and is capable of scanning speed at 12 seconds per image, largely limited by the bottleneck of data transferring from the CCD camera currently employed to the computer. The SOCT imaging results obtained from the animal tissues (cornea from an intact porcine eye) in vitro will be presented.