ITG Forum

Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Microscopy: From Data to Structure Through Physics

Speaker: P. Scott Carney, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC

Time: 12:00PM

Location: 2269 Tower Room

Abstract:

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides imaging of living samples and even in vivo examination of cell structure and dynamics. The sectional imaging of OCT is achieved by direct visualization of raw data obtained in focused optical range finding. As a result, there is, in the OCT community, a widely held belief that there exists a trade-off between transverse resolution and the thickness of the volume that may be imaged with a fixed focal plane. In this talk I will show that a complete understanding of the physics of the problem leads to algorithms that provide a three-dimensional reconstruction of the object with a spatially invariant point-spread function for the system. The spatial resolution is everywhere equal to the best resolution in the raw data (in the focal plane). Thus the supposed trade-off between resolution and depth of imaging is eliminated as is any rationale for scanning the focus. Indeed, there is no need to actually form a focus or for the raw data to resemble the reconstructed object. Hardware requirements are significantly relaxed without comprising image quality. We refer to this new modality as interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM). I will present the theoretical analysis, numerical simulations and experimental results.