Making Movies Inside Tissue

Researchers at Purdue University and the Imperial College of Science in London have created a real-time holographic system to acquire a fly-through movie of living tissue with infrared light and a special, semiconductor holographic film.

The researchers created the fly-through movie using optical coherence imaging (OCI). OCI is related to the more widely known optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, OCT involves scanning a laser beam through a sample and acquiring information point by point, which then must be assembled into a complete image. OCI, on the other hand, captures complete images of thin tissue sections that can be recorded directly with a video camera.

The image above is a 3-D view of a rat tumor reconstructed from multiple OCI image slices.

Reported by: P. Yu et al., Applied Physics Letters, 21 July 2003

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