Nanosensitive optical coherence tomography for the study of changes in static and dynamic structures

We briefly discuss the principle of image formation in Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (OCT). The theory of a new approach to improve dramatically the sensitivity of conventional OCT is described. The approach is based on spectral encoding of spatial frequency. Information about the spatial structure is directly translated from the Fourier domain to the image domain as different wavelengths, without compromising the accuracy. Axial spatial period profiles of the structure are reconstructed for any volume of interest within the 3D OCT image with nanoscale sensitivity. An example of application of the nanoscale OCT to probe the internal structure of medico-biological objects, the anterior chamber of an ex vivo rat eye, is demonstrated.