Fundamentals of OCT and Clinical Applications of Endoscopic OCT

17.1 Introduction

In the past decade, an increasing interest to new optical bioimaging modalities and rapid development of relevant optical technologies have stimulated elaboration of a number of OCT schemes which resulted in various laboratory setups. A wide range of optical components such as femtosecond lasers, superluminescent and thermal light sources, fiber optical and air interferometers, mechanical and piezo-optical scanning systems, highly sensitive detectors of interference signals with a large dynamic range were mastered for applications in OCT for the entire infra-red frequency band.

Selection of a scheme and creation of a specific OCT setup is guided primarily by the problem OCT is intended to solve. The main purpose of the study which results are presented in this chapter was creation of an endoscopic OCT device and application of this device for multi-disciplinary clinical studies. Obviously, in order to