Imaging Intracellular Motion with Dynamic Micro-Optical Coherence Tomography

This paper describes a new technology that uses 1-mu m-resolution optical coherence tomography (mu OCT) to obtain cross-sectional images of intracellular dynamics with dramatically enhanced image contrast. This so-called dynamic mu OCT (d-mu OCT) is accomplished by acquiring a time series of mu OCT images and conducting power frequency analysis of the temporal fluctuations that arise from intracellular motion on a pixel-per-pixel basis. Here, we demonstrate d-mu OCT imaging of freshly excised human esophageal and cervical biopsy samples. Depth-resolved d-mu OCT images of intact tissue show that intracellular dynamics provides a new contrast mechanism for mu OCT that highlights subcellular morphology and activity in epithelial surface maturation patterns. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement