In optical coherence tomography (OCT), image acquisition speed is still a limiting factor for many clinical applications. With the invention of rapidly tunable light sources for OCT (Swept-Source OCT), the speed could be increased many times over and opened up new fields of application. The FDML based OCT systems of our research group are even about one to two orders of magnitude faster than commercial systems. We call it "MHz-OCT", because it allows acquisitions of several million depth scans per second.
These high acquisition speeds in combination with currently available computing power and computer hardware offer a variety of potential new research and application fields, which are investigated in our group. For example, entire 3D volumes can be acquired in less than one second and even displayed live (VR-OCT). Another research focus is the acquisition of very large image areas such as ultra-widefield images of the retina (Eye OCT). Also in other fields of application, such as skin imaging, images of large areas are advantageous. In the future, these large field of views will also be realized with the support of robotic systems.
In addition, the high speed and phase stability of MHz OCT systems offer new possibilities of contrasting via speckle and phase contrast (Phasesensitive OCT) and numerical methods of image enhancement.
Publications about MHz-OCT can be found in the publication list.
