Clinical applications of functional optical coherence tomography

The purpose of the work presented in this thesis is to show the potential of functional optical coherence tomography (OCT) to discriminate pathological from normal tissues in several clinical settings, by means of the attenuation coefficient. To that end, several fundamental studies were carried out to increase the fundamental understanding of the measured signals (in phantoms, during apoptosis) and both ex and in vivo investigations are performed in the urological and gynecological clinic.