This article is part of the supplement: 1st Scientific Meeting of the Head and Neck Optical Diagnostics Society .

Oral presentation

Optical coherence tomography: challenge and opportunity

Zhongping Chen

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Beckman Laser Institute, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92612, USA

corresponding author email

from 1^st Scientific Meeting of the Head and Neck Optical Diagnostics Society
London, UK. 14 March 2009

Head & Neck Oncology 2009, 1(Suppl 1):O5doi:10.1186/1758-3284-1-S1-O5

Published:	28 July 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality based on coherence-domain optical technology. OCT takes advantage of the short coherence length of broadband light sources to perform micrometer-scale, cross-sectional imaging of biological tissue. OCT is analogous to ultrasound imaging except that it uses light rather than sound. The high spatial resolution of OCT enables noninvasive in vivo "optical biopsy" and provides immediate and localized diagnostic information. The first in vivo endoscopic OCT images in animals and humans were reported in 1997. Since then, a number of clinical applications for endoscopic OCT imaging of respiratory, urogenital, and gastrointestinal tracts have been reported by several groups. This presentation will review the principle of time domain and Fourier domain OCT and the current state-of-the-art OCT technology.