A global team of scientists, partnering with the University of St Andrews, has achieved a technological advancement in optical coherence tomography (OCT).
The recent study, featured in Science Advances (July 7), spearheaded by a team of specialists from the University of Adelaide, Australia, Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in partnership with the Aerospace Corp in the USA, and scholars from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, has the potential to enhance disease diagnosis.
The prevailing belief in conventional wisdom is that the OCT signal primarily consists of light that has undergone a single backscattering event, while light that has been scattered multiple times is considered detrimental to image quality. However, the research team has uncovered an alternative perspective. They have demonstrated that selectively collecting multiply scattered light can actually enhance image contrast, especially in samples with high scattering properties. They have shown how this can be achieved with relative ease and minimal additional optics by simply altering the paths of light delivery and collection.
