Quantitative reflection holographic tomography for in-vivo analysis of biological specimens (acronim: Re.HOT)

Project description:

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a widely adopted non-invasive imaging technique that allows visualizing cross-sectional images of a human eye. Enabling OCT to recover the refractive index (RI) distribution is the holy grail of imaging. It would revolutionize current OCT procedures, offering a quantitative diagnosis for the first time. This, in turn, would open doors to new, unique applications, like highly anticipated next-generation laser vision correction procedures, which today have no quality control tools. Currently, no biomedical imaging method can noninvasively provide live RI distribution of patients’ tissues in vivo. This is due to the required reflection mode of measurement. It inherently returns reconstructions with an optical transfer function that covers only the high-frequency region of the spectrum. To solve this problem, the Re.HOT project proposes a paradigm shift by changing how we treat OCT signals. Namely, by applying a unique numerical framework, it is intended to treat the light returning from the object as if it was transmitted twice through its part. As a result and as a breakthrough idea, OCT becomes a transmission quantitative imaging method in the sense that the measured signal covers a low-frequency region of the spectrum. What is more, the idea of the project is to innovatively combine this novel reformulation with a holographic tomography approach. For this reason, it is proposed within the project to capture the multiple angularly distributed OCT measurements and to apply a tailored tomographic reconstruction framework to retrieve the 3D RI distribution of live patients' tissue in vivo. This will be the first in the world imaging approach that will allow fully quantitative live online diagnostic, opening new possibilities not only in medicine (like a live pre and intraoperative assessment of the tissue) but also in materials engineering (in the high-quality investigation of composite layers) or photonics industry (in the validation of photonic integrated circuits).