Dongkyun Kang

Introduction to biomedical optical imaging issue

In this second special issue on Biomedical Optical Imaging, we present interesting papers on optical imaging technologies and their potential for aiding diagnosis and monitoring treatment. Six papers describe advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) for diagnosis, guiding therapy, and new probes. In the realm of diagnosis, OCT angiography (OCTA) was evaluated for visualizing microvascular changes associated with skin (Deegan et al.) and eye (Song et al.) diseases. For treatment guidance, polarization-sensitive (PS) OCT and OCTAwere demonstrated formonitoring the wound healing process (Part et al.). The feasibility of using OCT for monitoring and guiding laser therapy (Katta et al.) and radiofrequency ablation (Gonzalez-Suarez et al.) were also evaluated. A newOCT probewas developedwith an internal mirror, obviating the need for a separate reference arm, simplifying the development of less complex OCT systems (Singh et al.). Three papers evaluated spectroscopic technologies for guiding diagnosis and treatment. Time-resolved fluorescence and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy were tested for margin assessment during breast cancer surgery (Shalaby et al.). Spectroscopy was also applied for the diagnosis of nonmelanoma skin cancers with the goal of guiding biopsy (Cheng et al.). The feasibility of detecting nerves against the background of surrounding tissues with diffuse reflectance spectroscopy was also demonstrated (Langhout et al.). We thank the authors and reviewers who contributed to this issue. We look forward to seeing more papers on earlystage validation and translation of new optical imaging technologies in future issues.