Biomedical Optics Express has a special issue on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). Looking at the all the technology developed for OCT, including swept near-infrared lasers, high speed readouts, spectrographs, fiber optics, scanning probes, etc., it’s interesting to speculate on how they may play in analytical spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging.
Of particular interest in this issue are the articles by Swanson and Fujimoto on the ‘OCT ecosystem’, and by Klein and Huber on light sources.
One other interesting point: one of the authors of the first article in the issue is Claude Boccara. A previous work [D. Débarre, A. C. Boccara, and D. Fournier, Appl. Opt. 20, 4281 (1981)] started the FT-IR step-scan revolution. Richard Palmer’s then graduate student, Matt Smith, visited their laboratory and then recreated their design of a step-scan FT-IR. The initial publications using that spectrometer [Appl. Spectrosc. 43, 193-195 (1989)] spurred the development of commercial step-scan FT-IR spectrometers in the 1990s.