Chapter 10
Optical Imaging Procedures
Abstract Diverse optical imaging procedures have been developed and applied
successfully to biophotonics in research laboratories and clinical settings during the
past several decades. Technologies that have contributed to these successes include
advances in lasers and photodetectors, miniaturization of optical probes and their
associated instrumentation, and development of high-speed signal processing
techniques such as advanced computations in image reconstructions, computer
vision and computer-aided diagnosis, machine learning, and 3-D visualizations.
This chapter expands on the microscopic and spectroscopic technologies described
in the previous two chapters by addressing photonics-based imaging procedures
such as optical coherence tomography, miniaturized endoscopic processes, laser
speckle imaging, optical coherence elastography, photoacoustic tomography, and
hyperspectral imaging.
The discipline of medical imaging is widely used for the non-invasive imaging and
diagnoses of diseases and health impairments in humans. The image resolutions and
tissue penetration depths of some medical imaging techniques are shown in the
schematic in Fig.10.1. Common non-optical techniques such as ultrasound,
high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT), and magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) can penetrate deeply into the body but have large resolutions ranging from
150 to 1 mm. Imaging methods that have a lower penetration depth but which yield
muchfiner resolutions can be obtained with optical imaging techniques such as
confocal microscopy procedures, photoacoustic tomography, and various types of
optical coherence tomography.
Diverse optical imaging procedures have been developed and applied success-
fully to biophotonics in research laboratories and clinical settings during the past
several decades [ 1 – 3 ]. Technologies that have contributed to these successes include
advances in lasers and photodetectors, miniaturization of optical probes and their
associated instrumentation, and development of high-speed signal processing
techniques such as advanced 3-dimensional (3D) image reconstructions,
computer-aided diagnosis of imaging data, and software-based imaging data
acquisition and display. In addition to the advances in microscopic and spectroscopic
©Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016
G. Keiser,Biophotonics, Graduate Texts in Physics,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0945-7_10
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