Longitudinal imaging in biological tissues with a single laser shot correlation system

We demonstrate the potential of a new optical imaging system to directly obtain a longitudinal slice of a biological sample. The system, based on a single-shot optical correlator, operates a time-to-space conversion and an optical time-gating by sum-frequency generation in a nonlinear crystal. Owing to the high speed acquisition of the technique, internal structures of in-vivo tissues can be imaged at video rate.With this apparatus, we recorded longitudinal images of ex vivo mouse ear and in vivo human skin with a depth resolution of approximately 15 microm.