Dark-field full-field optical coherence tomography.

Full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) provides en face images from deep in the tissue with high spatial resolution. Specular reflections, however, may reduce image contrast as it can be much stronger than the backscattered signal from a specimen. To this end, we demonstrate dark-field FF-OCT (d-FF-OCT) that can block specular reflections by the help of an opaque disk in the pupil-conjugated plane. The reference mirror is replaced by a blazed grating, which eliminates a walk-off between the sample and the reference beams on a camera that otherwise limits the imaging field-of-view (FOV). We show that d-FF-OCT can suppress specular reflections efficiently from the glass-specimen interface by at least two orders of magnitude and yield higher contrast images compared to the conventional FF-OCT.