Doppler optical coherence tomography (DOCT) is a powerful tool for providing not only subsurface microstructural, but also functional information. Our group's system is able to image blood vessels as small as ~ 30 μm in diameter, with blood flows as slow as ~ 20 μm/s. Photodynamic therapy (PDT), once a "novel" cancer treatment, is now a major research field in biophotonics and is gaining clinical popularity. The highly sensitive DOCT system was used to image microcirculation in normal rat colon and a rat prostate cancer model before, during, and after PDT. The results demonstrate that DOCT can monitor the vascular changes during PDT and that DOCT can highlight the differences in tissue response with different treatment protocols. Furthermore, DOCT demonstrated differences in response between normal and cancerous tissues.

Date Published: 1 July 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5316, Coherence Domain Optical Methods and Optical Coherence Tomography in Biomedicine VIII, (1 July 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.527794

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5316:
Coherence Domain Optical Methods and Optical Coherence Tomography in Biomedicine VIII
Valery V. Tuchin; Joseph A. Izatt; James G. Fujimoto, Editor(s)