Speckle-resolved optical coherence tomography (srOCT) is a new and very attractive imaging method that intends to fill the gap between deep imaging with low resolution, as in diffuse optical tomography, and traditional OCT, which is based on the detection of ballistic light and thus enables high (diffraction-limited) resolution but is limited in signal depth penetration. Remarkably, the signal acquisition technique of srOCT is fast and simple and does not require the resolution of ill-posed inverse problems or complex experimental setups.

The main principle is to detect ‘snake photons’ that, being predominantly forward scattered, retain more information about the sample. This is done practically by tilting the reference arm of the OCT setup allowing a spatio-angular filtering of light. In addition, speckle-resolved detection is used to increase significantly the signal-to-noise ratio through single-shot incoherent averaging. Finally, the combination of filtering and incoherent averaging results in the capability of imaging real tissues as deep as 4.5 mm with good axial and lateral resolution of about 0.4 mm. This work is the first proof-of-concept and further optimization, especially in the filtering procedure, can be achieved.

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