LECTURE NOTES IN MEDICAL ENGINEERING

Let Laser Illustrate the Background of your Eye

A Short Introduction to Optical Coherence Tomography

These are the lecture notes for FAU’s YouTube Lecture “Medical Engineering”. This is a full transcript of the lecture video & matching slides. The course is supported by a corresponding Open Access Book, and Open Source Slides (zenodo/github). We hope, you enjoy this as much as the videos. Of course, this transcript was created with deep learning techniques largely automatically and only minor manual modifications were performed. Try it yourself! If you spot mistakes, please let us know!

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Welcome back to Medical Engineering. This is already the last video of our lecture series and today we want to discuss optical coherence tomography. So this is an imaging modality that now also uses light as a wave. You’ll see that we are actually using it in a very similar setup to ultrasound but this time we’re operating at very different wavelengths. Yet you can see that the emerging images and also image formation is very similar to ultrasound. So looking forward to exploring optical coherence tomography with you guys.

Image from the Medical Engineering lecture under CC BY 4.0.

We will start with a short introduction.

Image from the Medical Engineering lecture under CC BY 4.0.

So OCT is again a tomographic technique. So we produce again slice images. It’s non-invasive and operates at micrometer resolution. The major applications are clinical retinal imaging. So we are in ophthalmology the science of the eye and the treatment of the eye. You can already see here, this is a 2D OCT image of the human macula. So this is the background of the eye and you can see here that 250-micrometer resolution is this long in this direction and this long in this direction. So it’s an anisotropic image that we see here and the scales are much longer along the y-direction than on the x-direction here. So what you see here is the background of…