In vivo compound eye imaging using full-field optical coherence tomography

The anatomical structures of the eye possessed by vertebrates and arthropods are of two major types when considering the natural image-forming systems. Study of these vision systems gives an opportunity to understand the solution to a specific problem developed by the Nature. Also, the understanding of the eye systems in the animal world is fascinating and important in the development of bioinspired manufacturing of dioptric systems for many advanced and sophisticated instruments. The techniques used to study anatomical features of a compound eye like electron microscopies (SEM, TEM), micro computed tomography (mu CT), histology etc. have limitations, making them unsuitable for in vivo studies. In vivo imaging tools especially with high resolution imaging capability can provide an insight of visual ecology in greater detail. It also reduces the cost and the amount of time required to perform experiments. Full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) is an expansion of OCT technique that uses high numerical aperture microscope objective to get highly resolved en face tomographic image of a biological sample in the in vivo condition. We report the application of an in-house developed time domain full-field optical coherence tomography (TD FF-OCT) system for depth resolved en face and three dimensional, in vivo imaging of dragonfly's prominent compound eye.