Ptychographic optical coherence tomography.

Ptychography is a robust computational imaging technique that can reconstruct complex light fields beyond conventional hardware limits. However, for many wide-field computational imaging techniques, including ptychography, depth sectioning remains a challenge. Here we demonstrate a high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) computational imaging approach, which combines ptychography with spectral-domain imaging, inspired by optical coherence tomography (OCT). This results in a flexible imaging system with the main advantages of OCT, such as depth-sectioning without sample rotation, decoupling of transverse and axial resolution, and a high axial resolution only determined by the source bandwidth. The interferometric reference needed in OCT is replaced by computational methods, simplifying hardware requirements. As ptychography is capable of deconvolving the illumination contributions in the observed signal, speckle-free images are obtained. We demonstrate the capabilities of ptychographic optical coherence tomography (POCT) by imaging an axially discrete lithographic structure and an axially continuous mouse brain sample.