Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has seen widespread success as anin vivoclinical diagnostic 3D imaging modality, impacting areas including ophthalmology, cardiology, and gastroenterology. Despite its many advantages, such as high sensitivity, speed, and depth penetration, OCT suffers from several shortcomings that ultimately limit its utility as a 3D microscopy tool, such as its pervasive coherent speckle noise and poor lateral resolution required to maintain millimeter-scale imaging depths. Here, we present 3D optical coherence refraction tomography (OCRT), a computational extension of OCT that synthesizes an incoherent contrast mechanism by combining multiple OCT volumes, acquired across two rotation axes, to form a resolution-enhanced, speckle-reduced, refraction-corrected 3D reconstruction. Our label-free computational 3D microscope features a novel optical design incorporating a parabolic mirror to enable the capture of 5D plenoptic datasets, consisting of millimetric 3D fields of view over up to without moving the sample. We demonstrate that 3D OCRT reveals 3D features unobserved by conventional OCT in fruit fly, zebrafish, and mouse samples.
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Unified k-space theory of optical coherence tomography
We present a general theory of optical coherence tomography (OCT), which synthesizes the fundamental concepts and implementations of OCT under a common 3D -space framework. At the heart of this analysis is the Fourier diffraction theorem, which relates the coherent interaction between a sample and plane wave to the Ewald sphere in the 3D -space representation of the sample. While only the axial dimension of OCT is typically analyzed in -space, we show that embracing a fully 3D -space formalism allows explanation of nearly every fundamental physical phenomenon or property of OCT, including contrast mechanism, resolution, dispersion, aberration, limited depth of focus, and speckle. The theory also unifies diffraction tomography, confocal microscopy, point-scanning OCT, line-field OCT, full-field OCT, Bessel beam OCT, transillumination OCT, interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM), and optical coherence refraction tomography (OCRT), among others. Our unified theory not only enables clear understanding of existing techniques but also suggests new research directions to continue advancing the field of OCT.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1902904
- PAR ID:
- 10252541
- Publisher / Repository:
- Optical Society of America
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advances in Optics and Photonics
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1943-8206
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 462
- Size(s):
- Article No. 462
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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