Optical Coherence Tomography: Basic Concepts and Applications in Neuroscience Research
Table 1
Basic principles of some of the OCT techniques used in neuroscience research.
OCT techniques
Basic principles
Time domain OCT (TD-OCT)
A moving mirror in the reference arm, which centers the interference signal on a fixed Doppler frequency. Coherent demodulation, with a lock-in amplifier set to this frequency, enables detection of interference fringes produced by light scattered from the specimen
Fourier domain OCT (FD-OCT)
Data is acquired from the whole sample depth simultaneously with a fixed path length in the reference arm
Doppler OCT (D-OCT)
Speed of a moving particle is measured by detecting frequency shifts of the light scattered by the particle
Polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT)
Sample is exposed to light from multiple polarizations to measure birefringence
Spectroscopic OCT (S-OCT)
Wavelength-dependent absorption and light scattering are used to elucidate function
