Development of mathematical models for quantitative OCT: A review

Abstract

We review mathematical models describing how Optical Coherence Tomography works. Hereby, we focus on models based on Maxwell's equations and their simplifications. We highlight especially the effects of different modeling assumptions for the incident illumination, the medium, the light propagation, and the measurement setup and illustrate the qualitatively differing behavior in numerical simulations of the OCT data and compare them with real data from OCT measurements.

Keywords

• optical coherence tomography
• mathematical modeling
• gaussian wave
• maxwell's equations
• scattering theory
• experimental data