Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography as a Diagnosis Tool: Recent Progress with Multimodal Imaging

Full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) is a variant of OCT that is able to register 2D en face views of scattering samples at a given depth. Thanks to its superior resolution, it can quickly reveal information similar to histology without the need to physically section the sample. Sensitivity and specificity levels of diagnosis performed with FF-OCT are 80% to 95% of the equivalent histological diagnosis performances and could therefore benefit from improvement. Therefore, multimodal systems have been designed to increase the diagnostic performance of FF-OCT. In this paper, we will discuss which contrasts can be measured with such multimodal systems in the context of ex vivo biological tissue examination. We will particularly emphasize three multimodal combinations to measure the tissue mechanics, dynamics, and molecular content respectively.