Development of an Optical Coherence Tomograph (OCT) for small animal retinal imaging

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a medical imaging technique mostly used in ophthalmology that has been developed since early 1990s. Based on optical interferometry it is capable of producing high-resolution cross-sectional images of non-homogeneous tissues such as the ocular retina. Our goal is to develop a high speed OCT for retinal imaging in small animals. This will be a fundamental tool for research on retinal physiology and for developing new instrumentation and methods for OCT-based morphological and functional retinal imaging. The overall system is assembled from separated modular blocks to allow performance improvement and easy upgrading. Here, we present the first results obtained with this system.