Spatio-temporal optical coherence imaging – A new tool for in vivo microscopy

Abstract

Optical Coherence Imaging (OCI) including Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Optical Coherence Microscopy (OCM) uses interferometric detection to generate high-resolution volumetric images of the sample at high speeds. Such capabilities are significant for in vivo imaging, including ophthalmology, brain, intravascular imaging, as well as endoscopic examination. Instrumentation and software development allowed to create many clinical instruments. Nevertheless, most of OCI setups scan the incident light laterally. Hence, OCI can be further extended by wide-field illumination and detection. This approach, however, is very susceptible to the so-called crosstalk-generated noise. Here, we describe our novel approach to overcome this issue with spatio-temporal optical coherence manipulation (STOC), which employs spatial phase modulation of the incident light.