Coral Bio-optics

The lateral attenuation of diffuse reflectance can be mapped over a photosynthetic tissue. Diffusion theory can then be used to extract the scattering and absorption coefficient. The image shows the mapping of lateral light attenuation over the heterogeneous coral surface. 

The integrating sphere allows for mesaurements of total diffuse refelctance and transmittance of a sample. These values can be matched to theory to calcuate the scattering coefficient of a sample.

OCT measures characteristic patterns of directly elastically backscattered (low coherent ballistic and near ballistic) photons from different reflective layers in a sample, e.g. at refractive index mismatches between tissue compartments with different microstructural properties. Signal contrast in OCT thus depends on the optical scattering properties of the investigated material, where light scattering creates good image contrast, while highly NIR absorbing media result in poor images. Recently, OCT imaging has been applied in the environmental sciences in order to understand the structure and function of biofilms, higher plants, aquatic vertebrates and corals.