Real-time in vivo optical coherence microscopy

Summary form only given. In-vivo confocal microscopy has been proposed/sup 1/ and demonstrated as a powerful tool for noninvasive imaging permitting optical sectioning in bulk biological samples due to its strong axial discrimination. Depending on the numerical aperture (NA), axial and lateral resolutions of several micrometers are obtainable. The maximal depth of imaging is limited to several hundred microns in highly scattering tissues such as the skin, however, by multiple scattered photons arising from out-of-focus-regions of the sample. Optical coherence microscopy (OCM) is a combination of confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT). In OCM, the coherence gate of OCT is overlapped with the confocal gate of confocal microscopy to provide increased rejection of multiply scattered photons and therefore extend the usable depth range.