Abstract
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has emerged as one of the most important and successful applications of interferometry in the biomedical sciences. This is due, in part, to its simplicity, but also because its advantages are well matched to applications on transparent or translucent media, particularly in ophthalmology. OCT is a form of laser ranging, somewhat like radar. But where radar seeks to isolate distant reflections based on time of flight, OCT isolates reflections based on distance of flight, while rejecting the predominant noncoherent diffuse light that arises in dense turbid media. As we saw in the previous chapter, light propagating in tissue retains partial coherence as unscattered or minimally scattered photons, which can be reflected by structures inside the tissue and returned to the surface. OCT uses coherence-domain detection, namely interferometry, to isolate these coherent returns and to measure how far the reflected light has traveled.
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Nolte, D.D. (2012). Optical Coherence Tomography. In: Optical Interferometry for Biology and Medicine. Bioanalysis, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0890-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0890-1_11
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