Optical Coherence Tomography And Its Application In Embryonic Development

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an important biomedical imaging technique since 1990 and is highly applicable in clinic for ophthalmology and endoscopy. It is also very useful in other area like material inspection. In recent years OCT has been extensively studied and has big development in clinical application. Commercial system is now available for ophthalmic diagnostics. However, work on biological application of OCT is relatively less.For biological study, there is high demand for non-invasive, non-labeling optical imaging technique with high cellular resolution. To abstract more useful and precise information, high resolution OCT is critical, especially for observation in real time of embryo development.For full-field OCT the normal thermal light source is capable of achieving sub-micrometer high resolution and giving the so-called optical biopsy. In this thesis OCT technique was first applied for developmental biology. A full-field OCT system was suggested and set up to study early stage development of pre-implantation mouse embryo. The design and progress of the whole system was demonstrated in detail. The images of mouse embryo at different early stage development were also presented. The results proved that our full-field OCT system could perform non-invasive, non-labeling, in vivo and in real time optical imaging. 3D imaging of embryo was obtained by image and data reconstruction. The digital information of the cellular distribution of embryo development was also obtained for the biological study. All these proved full-field OCT successful as a new optical imaging methodology for the study of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.Another part of the work was on Parallel Frequency Domain OCT (PFD-OCT) and building a preliminary setup. Fast imaging of biological sample (onion) were demonstrated. The setup could perform 2D imaging at an imaging rate of more than 30 frames/s without mechanical scanning. The results showed PFD-OCT very promising as a fast, in real-time and in-vivo imaging technique for the biomedical application.Based on the experimental study, a proposal for full-filed OCT with spectral information was suggested to enhance the imaging performance. Suggestions of possible improvement on the MR-OCT and PFD-OCT were also discussed.