Speckle-modulating optical coherence tomography in living mice and humans

摘要

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful biomedical imagingtechnology that relies on the coherent detection of backscattered light toimage tissue morphology in vivo. As a consequence, OCT is susceptible tocoherent noise (speckle noise), which imposes significant limitations on itsdiagnostic capabilities. Here we show a method based purely on lightmanipulation that is able to entirely remove the speckle noise originating fromturbid samples without any compromise in resolution. We refer to this method asSpeckle-Free OCT (SFOCT). Using SFOCT, we succeeded in revealing smallstructures that are otherwise hidden by speckle noise when using conventionalOCT, including the inner stromal structure of a live mouse cornea, the finestructures inside the mouse pinna, sweat ducts, and Meissners corpuscle in thehuman fingertip skin. SFOCT has the potential to markedly increase OCTsdiagnostic capabilities of various human diseases by revealing minute featuresthat correlate with early pathology.