부산대학교 도서관

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has a comparatively high spatial resolution among tomographic bioimaging techniques and is less affected by changes in physiological conditions such as temperature, blood pressure, and osmolytes in the tissue. OCT detects changes in the refractive index of tissues, which is a function of the tissue glucose concentration (TGC). OCT signal intensity generally decreases with tissue depth, and its slope is expected to show a negative correlation with TGC in the interstitial fluid, reflecting blood glucose concentration. The currently applied OCT system for measuring TGC does not satisfy the accuracy for clinical demand, mainly because of the temporal and spatial variations of living tissues. In this letter, we propose a low magnification OCT (LM-OCT) for noninvasive monitoring of TGC by reducing the spatial resolution and show that LM-OCT significantly improves the accuracy of glucose measurement. The continuous development of LM-OCT in this direction is expected to offer a reliable and noninvasive tool for the clinical monitoring of TGC.