Human Oral Mucosal Epithelial Cell Sheets Imaging with High-resolution Phase-Diversity Homodyne OCT

摘要

There is a need for development of non-invasive technique to evaluate regenerative tissues such as cell sheets for transplantation. We demonstrated non-invasive imaging inside living cell sheets of human oral mucosal epithelial cells by phase-diversity homodyne optical coherence tomography (OCT). The new method OCT developed in Hitachi enables cell imaging because of high resolution (axial resolution; ～2.6 μm, lateral resolution; ～1 μm, in the air). Nuclei inside cell sheets were imaged with sufficient spatial resolution to identify each cell. It suggested that the new method OCT could be useful for non-invasive cell sheet evaluation test.