Optical coherence tomography for visualizing transient strains and measuring large deformations in laser-induced tissue reshaping

In the context of the development of emerging laser-assisted thermo-mechanical technologies for non-destructive reshaping of avascular collagenous tissues (cartilages and cornea), we report the first application of phase-sensitive optical coherence tomography (OCT) for visualizing transient strains involving supra-wavelength inter-frame displacements of scatterers. Usually phase-sensitive OCT assumes the visualization of sub-pixel and even sub-wavelength displacements of scatterers and fairly small strains (say