Researcher: Jeehyun Lee
Polarization-Sensitive Optical Coherence Tomography (PS-OCT) is an optical imaging technique that captures how the polarization of light changes as it travels through biological tissues. These changes reflect how fibrous structures like collagen or muscle fibers are organized, because such tissues exhibit birefringence, a property that alters light’s polarization depending on fiber alignment and density. PS-OCT is especially well suited for examining tissues with directional microstructure, including muscle, tendon, and skin. By analyzing depth-resolved polarization signals, PS-OCT can reveal structural changes that occur due to mechanical loading, injury, or disease.
Building on this framework, PS-OCT can be used to assess mechanical responses in fibrous tissues more generally. In particular, changes in fiber orientation under load can be quantified using polar histograms derived from depth-resolved optic-axis (OA) angles. Shifts in dominant orientation and angular dispersion may correspond to collagen uncrimping or local fiber reorganization. These measurements can be applied in ex vivo or in vivo settings and across tissues such as skin, tendon, and muscle to characterize microstructural responses to mechanical tension and to inform future studies on elasticity and remodeling.
