Comparison of propagation-based phase contrast tomography and full-field optical coherence tomography on bone tissue
Résumé
The current huge development of new 3D microscopic techniques (synchrotron microtomography, optical coherence tomography, light sheet microscopy, …) opens a large variety of new perspectives for life sciences. The contrasts of these new microscopies are mostly well understood on samples of known material content such as those used in physics or instrumentation studies. The situation is different when it comes to the interpretation of the contrasts observed with complex heterogeneous media found in biology. Therefore determining which 3D microscopy technique is suited for which biological question is a topic of current interest (see [1,2] for instance in our group).In this communication, we propose a comparison of the contrast observed with full-field optical coherence tomography (OCT) and propagation-based phase contrast tomography (PCT) on bone tissue at similar spatial resolution. A first comparison of OCT with standard absorption microtomography was given in [3] for bones and we extend this comparison to PCT which is known to provide enhanced contrast on bones at multiple scales [4]. The contrast of both these techniques are a priori interesting to be compared since they both rely on discontinuities of refraction index. This produces phase shift in PCT which operates in the X-ray domain with a monochromatic beam (generated by a synchrotron) while this generates direct intensity reflexion with OCT which only resorts to white light in the visible domain.