Optical Coherence Straingraphy using Low Coherence Intereferometer

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has been developed as a cross-sectional imaging method of microstructural biological tissue with high resolution 1-10μm. Recently, multifunctional OCT system has been promising, e. g. estimator of bio-mechanical characteristics. In this study, presented is Optical Coherence Straingraphy (OCS) on the basis of OCT system, which can diagnose tissue strain distribution. This is composed of the recursive cross-correlation method, resulting in deformation vector distribution with high resolution. In addition, the spatial vector interpolation by local least square method is introduced to remove erroneous vectors and smooth the vector distribution. This was experimentally applied to compressed homogeneous and heterogeneous samples. Conse-quently, the deformation vector distribution has less erroneous vectors and better agreement with the estimation of ideal uniform compression than that obtained by the conventional direct cross-correlation method. Therefore, the proposed method was validated with the smooth strain map having the same high resolution 20μm as that defined by optical system.