Dynamic optical coherence tomography strongly enhances contrast in the ex vivo murine cochlea

We report dynamic optical coherence tomography (D-OCT) images of the organ of Corti (ooC) in ex vivo mouse cochleas. The ooC is responsible for transducing sound-evoked mechanical vibrations and amplifying them in the process of hearing. Thorough knowledge of the micromechanical properties of the ooC is required for understanding how hearing functions. Recently, OCT has emerged as a safe and effective tool to probe the inner workings of the cochlea and ooC. However, OCT is limited in its ability to directly resolve cellular architecture due to limited optical scattering-based contrast between different cell types. D-OCT is a label-free method capable of probing sub-resolution movements by analyzing speckle and phase information from standard OCT data as a function of time. We show that key structures in the ooC can be identified with D-OCT versus standard OCT, and that D-OCT has the potential to characterize the ooC and advance our understanding of the process of hearing.