Full-field optical coherence tomography (FFOCT) is a variation of OCT, in which 2D en face tangential optical slices are directly recorded on a camera without point-by-point lateral scanning. The FFOCT microscope combines the penetration capability and high axial resolution sectioning of OCT with the high transverse resolution of confocal microscopy. Additionally, in FFOCT, contrary to confocal microscopy, axial resolution (dependent on the bandwidth of the light source) and lateral resolution (dependent on the resolving power of the objectives) are completely decoupled. This implies that FFOCT with moderate numerical aperture objectives can achieve a larger field-of-view, along with a long working distance enabling non-contact operation, and at the same time high lateral and axial resolutions down to 1 µm. Recently, another particular feature of FFOCT was discovered, that is, geometrical aberrations do not decrease spatial resolution, but only lower the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which can be recovered with adaptive optics. FFOCT has been demonstrated in a variety of applications and is now commercially available. It has been applied to imaging of biopsies of various tissues, studies in developmental biology, in vivo endoscopy, material characterization and, recently, for in vivo human internal fingerprint imaging, useful for personal identification purposes. Regarding ophthalmic applications, FFOCT has been used for the characterization of various ex vivo tissues from the anterior and posterior segments of animal eyes. It was shown to provide valuable assessment of human corneal grafts, which could potentially improve outcome of corneal transplantation.
