Abstract
The eye is essentially transparent, transmitting light with only minimal optical attenuation and scattering and also provides easy optical access to the anterior segment as well as the retina. Hence, ophthalmologic and especially retinal imaging has been not only the first but also most successful area in medical diagnosis for optical coherence tomography (OCT).1,2 Recent development of ultrabroad bandwidth light sources and detection technology has enabled significant improvement of ophthalmic axial OCT imaging resolution, demonstrating the potential of ultrahigh resolution OCT (UHR OCT) to perform three-dimensional non-invasive optical biopsy, i.e. the in vivo visualization of microstructural morphology in situ, which had previously only been possible with histopathology3. The development of novel detection techniques (Frequency Domain OCT) enabled the combination of UHR OCT and extremely fast data acquisition for three dimensional UHR OCT of several macular pathologies with high axial resolution of 3 pm employing a compact, commercially available ultrabroad bandwidth (160nm) Titanium:sapphire laser at video-rate with up to 25 B-scans/second4.
© 2006 Optical Society of America
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