ABSTRACT
Owing to these unique features, OCT research advances have been gaining increasing attention and are nding numerous applications in areas of biological research and medical practice. In the early 1990s, when the technology was rst demonstrated, OCT quickly found a niche in ophthalmology, where it provided the rst in situ high-resolution 3D images of structures in the eye (Drexler and Fujimoto 2008b), including the retina, cornea, and the optic disc. Before long, the advantages of OCT were recognized in many other elds, including cell biology (Boppart et al. 1998; Drexler et al. 1999), dermatology (Gambichler et al. 2005; Weissman et al. 2004), cancer research (Zhou et al. 2010; Zysk et al. 2007), dentistry (Colston et al. 1998; Otis et al. 2000), and tissue engineering (Liang et al. 2009; Matcher 2011), to name a few. e invention and development of endoscopy and catheter OCT devices (Herz et al. 2004; Tearney et al. 1996, 1997) has extended the use of this technology to cardiovascular (Boppart et al. 1997; Jenkins et al. 2006), gastrointestinal (Herz et al. 2004; Rollins et al. 1999), urological (Wang et al. 2011), and gynecological (Jackle et al. 2000) applications. Today, OCT continues to develop rapidly in many areas, with new technologies and variant modalities emerging, which are not only improving the performance of OCT in terms of resolution, contrast, functional analysis capability, and imaging speed but also bringing it to new elds of application. In this chapter, we will introduce the working principle of OCT, review recent advances in OCT technology and applications, and exploit the unique features of OCT for cellular imaging, particularly for the investigation of cell activity and dynamics in in vivo skin and engineered tissues.
