Full-field OCT for developmental biology - art. no. 65341U

In this paper, we developed a full-field OCT system using thermal light as the low-coherence light source. A well-known Linnik interferometer configuration was used. Broad spectral width of the thermal light 450-650nm was used to achieve high axial resolution of 1.1 mu M in biological sample for OCT imaging. Two water immersion objectives of 0.5N.A were used to balance the dispersion and a transverse resolution of 0.7 mu m was obtained. With a fast machine-coding algorithm, system sensitivity of more than 80dB and imaging rate as high as 18frame/s with 500x500 pixels per frame could be achieved. Mouse embryos were imaged in vivo with full-field OCT at different depth for the developmental study. Useful information for pre-implementation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was obtained by image analysis and segmentation. As far as known, for the fist time, 3D images of mammalian embryos were obtained with full-field OCT without the need of dye labeling.