Technology developments and biomedical applications of polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Abstract

Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) enables depth-resolved mapping of sample polarization information, such as phase-retardation and optical axis orientation, which is particularly useful when the nano-scale organization of tissue that are difficult to be observed in the intensity images of a regular optical coherence tomography (OCT). In this review, we survey two types of methods and systems of PS-OCT. The first type is PS-OCT with single input polarization state, which contain bulk optics or polarization maintaining fiber (PMF) based systems and single-mode fiber (SMF) based systems. The second type is PS-OCT with two different input polarization states, which contain SMF based systems and PMF based systems, through either time, frequency, or depth multiplexing. In addition, representative biomedical applications using PS-OCT, such as retinal imaging, skin cancer detection, and brain mapping, are demonstrated.

Keywords

optical coherence tomography (OCT) / polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) / polarization / imaging

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Grant Nos. R01DK094877, R21AG042700, R21DK088066 and R21EB012215), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Grant No. CBET-1254743) (CAREER Award). We acknowledge Qinggong Tang for helpful comments.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg