Gabor-based fusion technique for Optical Coherence Microscopy

• Published in: Optics express 2010-02, Vol.18 (4), p.3632-3642
• Main Authors: Rolland, Jannick P, Meemon, Panomsak, Murali, Supraja, Thompson, Kevin P, Lee, Kye-sung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Equipment Design; Equipment Failure Analysis; Image Enhancement - instrumentation; Lenses; Microscopy - instrumentation; Tomography, Optical Coherence - instrumentation
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/oe.18.003632

We recently reported on an Optical Coherence Microscopy technique, whose innovation intrinsically builds on a recently reported - 2 microm invariant lateral resolution by design throughout a 2 mm cubic full-field of view - liquid-lens-based dynamic focusing optical probe [Murali et al., Optics Letters 34, 145-147, 2009]. We shall report in this paper on the image acquisition enabled by this optical probe when combined with an automatic data fusion method developed and described here to produce an in-focus high resolution image throughout the imaging depth of the sample. An African frog tadpole (Xenopus laevis) was imaged with the novel probe and the Gabor-based fusion technique, demonstrating subcellular resolution in a 0.5 mm (lateral) x 0.5 mm (axial) without the need, for the first time, for x-y translation stages, depth scanning, high-cost adaptive optics, or manual intervention. In vivo images of human skin are also presented.