Lab-made accessible full-field optical coherence tomography imaging system

In this work, an easy to understand optical system was developed for the study of the medical imaging technique optical coherence tomography (OCT). This technique allows volumetric reconstruction of inhomogeneous, non-transparent and scattering samples such as biological tissues. The implementation was based on using non-specialized components for OCT under the scheme of a Michelson interferometer with a CCD camera to capture the interference patterns in a configuration known as full field OCT (FFOCT). Our system, explained in detail, was designed using components commonly found in most optical labs because our focus is to provide an accessible experimental setup for understanding the basics of OCT. The developed system possesses an axial resolution of 1.74 μm and a lateral resolution of 4.5 μm. With the described system, tomograms of two samples were obtained: a metal coin and an ex-vivo insect wing of the blattodea family.