Abstract

Abstract
Chick embryos are among the most studied species in development biology because they are easily obtained, highly accessible and present a similar development to that of humans. Normally morphological studies are carried out with confocal microscopy, however in-situ imaging is impossible and in-vivo imaging can only be performed with great difficulty. For confocal microscopy the embryo has to be studied outside the egg, what generally also means a short life expectancy of the embryo. Additionally, extracting the embryo of the egg precludes the possibility of studying its development in its natural environment. In this paper it is shown that en-face optical coherence tomography (en-face OCT) is a possible solution to overcome these difficulties allowing for an in-situ and in-vivo study over a timescale of several days. With en-face OCT it is possible to accompany the development of one single embryo over several days and to acquire high resolution and axially resolved images. © 2009 SPIE-OSA.

Abstract
We derive the time-variant second-order statistics of the depth-scan photocurrent in time-domain optical coherence tomography (TD-OCT) systems using polarized thermal light sources and superluminescent diodes (SLDs). Since the asymptotic-joint-probability-distribution function (JPDF) of the photocurrent due to polarized thermal light is Gaussian and the signal-noise-ratio in TD-OCT is typically high (> 80 dB), the JPDF of the depth-scan photocurrent could be approximated as a Gaussian random process that is completely determined by its second-order statistics. We analyze both direct and differential light detection schemes and include the effect of electronic thermal fluctuations. Our results are a necessary prerequisite for future development of statistical image processing techniques for TD-OCT. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract