Retinal, choroidal and scleral imaging by using swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) with a 1-microm band probe light, and high-contrast and three-dimensional (3D) imaging of the choroidal vasculature are presented. This SS-OCT has a measurement speed of 28,000 A-lines/s, a depth resolution of 10.4 microm in tissue, and a sensitivity of 99.3 dB. Owing to the high penetration of the 1-microm probe light and the high sensitivity of the system, the in vivo sclera of a healthy volunteer can be observed. A software-based algorithm of scattering optical coherence angiography (S-OCA) is developed for the high-contrast and 3D imaging of the choroidal vessels. The S-OCA is used to visualize the 3D choroidal vasculature of the in vivo human macula and the optic nerve head. Comparisons of S-OCA with several other angiography techniques including Doppler OCA, Doppler OCT, fluorescein angiography, and indocyanine green angiography are also presented.

The retinal and choroidal thicknesses were well-correlated between the instruments. Higher reliability and reproducibility are expected for the choroidal thickness measurements despite with higher morphologic interindividual variations.

The choroidal thickness map showed a distribution entirely different from the retinal thickness map. Choroidal thickness varies significantly with location, axial length, refractive error, and age. These variations should be considered when evaluating choroidal thickness.

An advanced version of Jones matrix optical coherence tomography (JMT) is demonstrated for Doppler and polarization sensitive imaging of the posterior eye. JMT is capable of providing localized flow tomography by Doppler detection and investigating the birefringence property of tissue through a three-dimensional (3-D) Jones matrix measurement. Owing to an incident polarization multiplexing scheme based on passive optical components, this system is stable, safe in a clinical environment, and cost effective. Since the properties of this version of JMT provide intrinsic compensation for system imperfection, the system is easy to calibrate. Compared with the previous version of JMT, this advanced JMT achieves a sufficiently long depth measurement range for clinical cases of posterior eye disease. Furthermore, a fine spectral shift compensation method based on the cross-correlation of calibration signals was devised for stabilizing the phase of OCT, which enables a high sensitivity Doppler OCT measurement. In addition, a new theory of JMT which integrates the Jones matrix measurement, Doppler measurement, and scattering measurement is presented. This theory enables a sensitivity-enhanced scattering OCT and high-sensitivity Doppler OCT. These new features enable the application of this system to clinical cases. A healthy subject and a geographic atrophy patient were measured in vivo, and simultaneous imaging of choroidal vasculature and birefringence structures are demonstrated.