Abstract. In the last 25 years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has advanced to be one of the most innovative and most successful translational optical imaging techniques, achieving substantial economic impact as well as clinical acceptance. This is largely owing to the resolution improvements by a factor of 10 to the submicron regime and to the imaging speed increase by more than half a million times to more than 5 million A-scans per second, with the latter one accomplished by the state-of-the-art swept source laser technologies that are reviewed in this article. In addition, parallelization of OCT detection, such as line-field and full-field OCT, has shortened the acquisition time even further by establishing quasi-akinetic scanning. Besides the technical improvements, several functional and contrast-enhancing OCT applications have been investigated, among which the label-free angiography shows great potential for future studies. Finally, various multimodal imaging modalities with OCT incorporated are reviewed, in that these multimodal implementations can synergistically compensate for the fundamental limitations of OCT when it is used alone. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

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We implemented a Lagrange-multiplier (LM)-based damped least-squares (DLS) control algorithm in a woofer-tweeter dual deformable-mirror (DM) adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO). The algorithm uses data from a single Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor to simultaneously correct large-amplitude low-order aberrations by a woofer DM and small-amplitude higher-order aberrations by a tweeter DM. We measured the in vivo performance of high resolution retinal imaging with the dual DM AOSLO. We compared the simultaneous LM-based DLS dual DM controller with both single DM controller, and a successive dual DM controller. We evaluated performance using both wavefront (RMS) and image quality metrics including brightness and power spectrum. The simultaneous LM-based dual DM AO can consistently provide near diffraction-limited in vivo routine imaging of human retina.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) with unprecedented submicrometer axial resolution achieved by use of a photonic crystal fiber in combination with a compact sub-10-fs Ti:sapphire laser (Femtolasers Produktions) is demonstrated for what the authors believe is the first time. The emission spectrum ranges from 550 to 950 nm (lambda(c)=725 nm , P(out)=27 mW) , resulting in a free-space axial OCT resolution of ~0.75 mum , corresponding to ~0.5 mum in biological tissue. Submicrometer-resolution OCT is demonstrated in vitro on human colorectal adenocarcinoma cells HT-29. This novel light source has great potential for development of spectroscopic OCT because its spectrum covers the absorption bands of several biological chromophores.