Jm. Schmitt et al., OPTICAL-COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY OF A DENSE TISSUE - STATISTICS OF ATTENUATION AND BACKSCATTERING, Physics in medicine and biology, 39(10), 1994, pp. 1705-1720
This paper addresses fundamental issues that underlie the interpretati
on of images acquired from turbid tissues by optical-coherence tomogra
phy (OCT). The attenuation and backscattering properties of freshly ex
cised rat arteries and their dependence on the focusing and collection
optics of the ocr system were measured at two wavelengths in the near
infrared (830 nm and 1300 nm). Determined from the ratio of the magni
tudes of the reflections from glass plates placed on both sides of the
arteries, the mean attenuation coefficient of the arterial wall was f
ound to be in the range 14 < mu(t) < 22 mm(-1) at 830 nm and 11 < mu(t
) < 20 mm(-1) at 1300 nm. The measured values of mu(t) were lowest for
the longer source wavelength and for probe beams with the smallest av
erage diameters. The observed dependence of mu(t), on beam size indica
tes that relatively large-scale Variations in the index of refraction
of the tissue contributed to degradation of the tranverse spatial cohe
rence of the beam. We introduce a framework for understanding and quan
tifying beam-size effects by way of the mutual-coherence function. The
fact that spatial variations in backscattering and attenuation (which
includes spatial-coherence losses) have similar effects on OCT signal
s makes the origin of the signals difficult to determine. Evidence is
given that suggests that, in spite of this difficulty, certain feature
s of microstructures embedded several hundred micrometres deep in a tu
rbid tissue can still be detected and characterized.