Advances in Optical Coherence Tomography

Traditionally applied to imaging the eye, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is now being extended to fields outside ophthalmology and optometry. The tremendous increase in acquisition speed of the spectral domain OCT technology in the last decade has enabled the OCT community to contemplate real time volume display, has opened the field of no-dye angiography and that of fast interrogation of deformation patterns in elastography. The presentation will review the OCT applications in ophthalmology and endoscopy as well as the dynamic field of broadband and fast tunable optical sources for OCT. Current research in Kent combined spectral domain and time domain OCT principles into a new method, Master/Slave OCT, that delivers fast display of any number of en-face OCT images. The Master/Slave method simplifies the OCT technology, the signal processing as well as gives parallel, direct access to information from multiple depths in the tissue. A review is presented on the advances of OCT that make the technology useful for numerous directions in medical imaging and for non-destructive testing.