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Advances in optical coherence tomography for dermatology

Medical Physics 2018-04-06 v1

Abstract

This paper reports on advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) for application in dermatology. Full-field OCT is a particular approach of OCT based on white-light interference microscopy. FF-OCT produces en face tomographic images by arithmetic combination of interferometric images acquired with an area camera and by illuminating the whole field of view with low-coherence light. The major interest of FF-OCT lies in its high imaging spatial resolution (\sim 1.0 μ\mum) in both lateral and axial directions, using a simple and robust experimental arrangement. Line-field OCT (LF-OCT) is a recent evolution of FF-OCT with line illumination and line detection using a broadband spatially coherent light source and a line-scan camera in an interference microscope. LF-OCT and FF-OCT are similar in terms of spatial resolution. LF-OCT has a significant advantage over FF-OCT in terms of imaging penetration depth due to the confocal gate achieved by line illumination and detection. B-scan imaging using FF-OCT requires the acquisition of a stack of en face images, which usually prevents in vivo applications. B-scan imaging using LF-OCT can be considerably faster due to the possibility of using a spatially coherent light source with much higher brightness along with a high-speed line camera. Applied in the field of dermatology, the LF-OCT images reveal a comprehensive morphological mapping of skin tissues in vivo at a cellular level similar to histological images.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.01688,
  title  = {Advances in optical coherence tomography for dermatology},
  author = {Olivier Levecq and Arthur Davis and Hicham Azimani and David Siret and Jean-Luc Perrot and Arnaud Dubois},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.01688},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:14:27.976Z