Optical reflection tomography along the geometrical thickness

摘要

Very recently, we proposed and demonstrated a novel optical reflection tomography along the geometrical thickness, reflecting a real cross-sectional structure of an object. This technique is based on simultaneous measurement of refractive index n and thickness t of a sample using the combination of a low coherence interferometer and confocal optics. The interferometer provides optical coherence tomography (OCT) of the dimension of the optical thickness (= n X t) along the optical axis, while the confocal optics gives us another type of reflection tomography, having the thickness dimension of nearly t along the optical axis. This tomography can be called confocal reflection tomography (CRT) and has not yet been demonstrated, to our knowledge. Simple image processing of OCT and CRT results in desired reflection tomographic image, showing two-dimensional refractive index distribution along the geometrical thickness. In this paper, we present the validity of our proposed method using the concave glass plate as well as the application for in vivo measurement of biological tissue.