Optical coherence tomography for clinical otology

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an interferometric optical imaging technique that can be used to produce depth resolved images in biological samples and can be thought of as the optical analog to ultrasonic imaging. By probing a tissue sample with a spatially coherent light source and interfering the back-scattered light with a reference beam, both the structure and dynamics of the sample can be inferred using a variety of interferometric techniques. Researchers have built a phase-sensitive swept-source OCT (SS-OCT) system and optimized it for real-time imaging of the human middle-ear, in vivo, with Doppler vibrometry capabilities.