Functional imaging of cat primary visual cortex with optical coherence tomography

We report the application of Optical coherence tomography (OCT) for visualizing a one dimensional depth resolved functional structure of cat brain in vivo. The OCT system is based on the known fact that neural activation induces structural changes such as capillary dilation and cellular swelling. Detecting these changes as an amplitude change of the scattered light, an OCT signal reflecting neural activity i.e., fOCT (functional OCT) could be obtained. Experiments have been done to obtain a depth resolved stimulus-specific profile of activation in cat visual cortex. Our results in one dimension indicate that indeed an orientation dependent functional signal could be obtained. Further, we show that this depth resolved fOCT signal is well correlated with the stimulus dependent column determined by OISI. Based on the results, the smallest functional unit in depth, resolved by the proposed system is around 40 μm. We are extending our system to perform two dimensional functional imaging.