Principles of OCT Imaging

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) uses the interference between the light waves reflected by the reference and sample arms to obtain spatial information on tissue microstructure, which is used to construct an in-vivo cross-sectional image. OCT has become an essential part of daily practice in the field of ophthalmology and glaucoma over the past 30 years. This success was possible by tremendous advances of its technology toward better sensitivity and faster scan speed from Time-domain to Spectral-domain and Swept-source OCT. This chapter was written to describe the basic principles of OCT and how they enable its various applications, which are crucial to understand how such advances of OCT have been possible in the past, and why OCT still has boundless potential for future growth.