Optical coherence tomography today: speed, contrast, and multimodality

In the last 25 years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has advanced to be one of the most innovative and most successful translational optical imaging techniques, achieving substantial economic impact as well as clinical acceptance. This is largely owing to the resolution improvements by a factor of 10 to the submicron regime and to the imaging speed increase by more than half a million times to more than 5 million A-scans per second, with the latter one accomplished by the state-of-the-art swept source laser technologies that are reviewed in this article. In addition, parallelization of OCT detection, such as line-field and full-field OCT, has shortened the acquisition time even further by establishing quasi-akinetic scanning. Besides the technical improvements, several functional and contrast-enhancing OCT applications have been investigated, among which the label-free angiography shows great potential for future studies. Finally, various multimodal imaging modalities with OCT incorporated are reviewed, in that these multimodal implementations can synergistically compensate for the fundamental limitations of OCT when it is used alone.