Full-field optical coherence microscopy

We present the new advances in full field optical coherence microscopy, an alternative method to conventional optical coherence tomography (OCT). The experimental setup is based on a Linnik interferometer illuminated with a tungsten halogen lamp. En face tomographic images are obtained in real-time without scanning by computing the difference of two phase-opposed interferometric images recorded by a high-resolution CCD camera. The short coherence length of the source and the compensation of dispersion mismatch in the interferometer arms yield an optical sectioning ability with 0.8 mum resolution in water. Transverse resolution of 1.0 mum is achieved by using microscope objectives with a numerical aperture of 0.5. A shot-noise limited detection sensitivity of 86 dB can be reached with 2 s acquisition time. High-resolution images of the anterior segment of the rat eye are shown.