Applications of Coherent Optics and Holography in Biomedical Engineering

Coherent optics and holography have become potential tools in offering tangible solutions to various problems in science, engineering, and medicine. Holography, with its three-dimensional nature and high resolution, finds applications in microscopy and macroscopy. Various holographic interferometric techniques are highly useful in diagnostic medicine. Coherent optical processors have remarkably high speeds and offer a parallel processing facility. Accordingly, these processors should be of great use in biomedical data processing like spectral analysis, correlation, image enhancement, etc. A survey of these techniques and their typical applications to problems in biomedical engineering has been given.