A study of the statistical properties of scattered radiation under optical coherence tomography conditions: scattering medium characterization via the power spectrum and the probability density function

This thesis explores theory and data processing techniques that have the potential to extract much more information about a sample than can be gathered from standard optical coherence tomography (OCT) structural images. First, work is done towards making non-invasive glucose measurements via OCT and dynamic light scattering (DLS) techniques. A recently developed theory which models the power spectrum of the radiation scattered from flowing Brownian particles under OCT conditions is described, along with the experiments conducted that validate it. Second, it is demonstrated that the scattering of radiation from tissue-simulating phantoms has non-Gaussian features when there are a small number of scatterers in the OCT scattering volume, and that the statistics are well-described by the K distribution, which allows for scatterer concentration measurements. Subsequent preliminary experiments were conducted on human tissue, and the results show promise for differentiating between different tissue types.M.Sc