Integrated-optics-based optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high resolution, imaging technique that has developed over the last 20 years from a complicated laboratory setup into a ready-to-use commercially available device. Instead of using electronic time gating as being used by ultrasound (US) imaging, in OCT, the optical analogue of US imaging, determines the time of flight using low coherence interferometry. To date, OCT has many clinical applications and is widely used in urology, cardiovascular imaging, dentistry, dermatology and ophthalmology. Currently OCT devices are bulky and expensive, which limits the use of OCT, not only in its existing applications, but also in many application areas such as process control, biometrics or forensic science. Integrated optics can offer a significant cost and size reduction for many bulk optics components and integrate them in a single platform. As a result, integrated optics can make OCT systems smaller, robust, more cost efficient. Integrated optics even can add more functionality to OCT systems, which would be too difficult or complex to realize in bulk optics. In this thesis, the goals of our research are 1) to integrate and miniaturize OCT devices in integrated optics, 2) to explore the new OCT functionalities in both integrated optics and bulk optics.