The significance of OCT imaging in ophthalmic surgery has been proved in experiments on animal eyes, human eye models, and clinical cases. In recent years, commercial OCT surgical navigation equipment has already been widely used in ophthalmic clinical surgery. With the progress of image processing technology, image and ophthalmology, OCT surgical navigation equipment will further promote the innovation of ophthalmic surgery, and thus promote the development of the ophthalmology field.During ophthalmic microsurgery, the visualization of internal structures is limited by traditional intraoperative imaging methods due to their lack of depth information. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-contact tomographic imaging technique that is widely used for intraoperative navigation in ophthalmic surgery because of its ability to provide depth information, non-invasiveness, fast imaging, and high resolution. Typical OCT devices can be divided into handheld OCT and microscope-integrated OCT. This article briefly introduces the mechanism and development of time domain OCT and fourier domain OCT, reviews the development of OCT ophthalmic surgical navigation devices, introduces representative OCT systems in each category, describes and compares their imaging principles, performance, advantages, and disadvantages, and finally concludes with a summary and outlook on the applications of this technology in ophthalmic surgery.