Optical coherence tomography: Emerging in vivo optical biopsy technique for oral cancers

Oral cancers are a major health burden, and patients suffer from low survival rate owing to their late detection. Optical techniques are rapid, objective, and noninvasive methods with the potential to serve as adjunct screening/ diagnostic tools, especially for cancers. This chapter highlights the advancements in oral cancer exploration using optical coherence tomography (OCT) with a discussion on basic principles of OCT, followed by a detailed description of oral cancer studies, subgrouped into animal studies, and ex vivo and in vivo human studies. We have included full-field OCT system-derived in vivo oral mucosa images in a healthy volunteer at different subsites showing standard microanatomy at various depths and also narrated some strategies to improve OCT results by multimodal approaches as well as through contrast enhancement for improved visualization.