Handbook of Biomedical Optics

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15.1 Introduction

e rst in vivo clinical application of optical coherence tomog-

raphy (OCT) was in the early 1990s in the eld of ophthalmol-

ogy (Fercher et al. 1993, Swanson et al. 1993). Since that time,

OCT has been applied to a wide range of clinical elds, including

gastroenterology, cardiology, oncology, pulmonology, dermatol-

ogy, dentistry, and experimental biology. e axial, or depth,

resolution of OCT is on the order of a few microns, similar to

that of a standard histology slice. us, OCT is oen referred to

as an “optical biopsy” and images resemble histologic sections

obtained by standard biopsy or staining techniques.