This paper reports on advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) for application in dermatology. Full-field OCT is a particular approach of OCT based on white-light interference microscopy. FF-OCT produces en face tomographic images by arithmetic combination of interferometric images acquired with an area camera and by illuminating the whole field of view with low-coherence light. The major interest of FF-OCT lies in its high imaging spatial resolution (∼ 1.0 μm) in both lateral and axial directions, using a simple and robust experimental arrangement. Line-field OCT (LFOCT) is a recent evolution of FF-OCT with line illumination and line detection using a broadband spatially coherent light source and a line-scan camera in an interference microscope. LF-OCT and FF-OCT are similar in terms of spatial resolution. LF-OCT has a significant advantage over FF-OCT in terms of imaging penetration depth due to the confocal gate achieved by line illumination and detection. B-scan imaging using FF-OCT requires the acquisition of a stack of en face images, which usually prevents in vivo applications. B-scan imaging using LF-OCT can be considerably faster due to the possibility of using a spatially coherent light source with much higher brightness along with a high-speed line camera. Applied in the field of dermatology, the LF-OCT images reveal a comprehensive morphological mapping of skin tissues in vivo at a cellular level similar to histological images.

Date Published: 24 May 2018
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 10677, Unconventional Optical Imaging, 106770K (24 May 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2315765

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10677:
Unconventional Optical Imaging
Corinne Fournier; Marc P. Georges; Gabriel Popescu, Editor(s)