Strain and elasticity imaging in compression optical coherence elastography: The two-decade perspective and recent advances

Quantitative mapping of deformation and elasticity in optical coherence tomography has attracted much attention of researchers during the last two decades. However, despite intense effort it took similar to 15 years to demonstrate optical coherence elastography (OCE) as a practically useful technique. Similarly to medical ultrasound, where elastography was first realized using the quasi-static compression principle and later shear-wave-based systems were developed, in OCE these two approaches also developed in parallel. However, although the compression OCE (C-OCE) was proposed historically earlier in the seminal paper by J. Schmitt in 1998, breakthroughs in quantitative mapping of genuine local strains and the Young's modulus in C-OCE have been reported only recently and have not yet obtained sufficient attention in reviews. In this overview, we focus on underlying principles of C-OCE; discuss various practical challenges in its realization and present examples of biomedical applications of C-OCE. The figure demonstrates OCE-visualization of complex transient strains in a corneal sample heated by an infrared laser beam.

Automated summary

Over the past two decades, quantitative mapping of deformation and elasticity in optical coherence tomography has been a focus of research, and it took about 15 years to demonstrate optical coherence elastography as a useful technique. Compression OCE and shear-wave-based OCE have developed in parallel, with recent breakthroughs in quantitative mapping in Compression OCE but insufficient attention in reviews.