Master/slave: the ideal tool for coherence revival based optical coherence tomography imaging instruments

Updated on 27 January 2017

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Master/slave: the ideal tool for coherence revival based optical coherence tomography imaging instruments (abstract)
Adrian Bradu, Sylvain Rivet, Adrian Podoleanu
1 February 2017 • 9:45 – 10:00 AM | Part of SPIE BiOS

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Abstract

Currently, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is almost exclusively implemented via Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) in both, camera (CB) or swept source (SS) based OCT instruments. Here, we demonstrate that the Master/Slave (MS) method of implementing spectral (Fourier) domain OCT can be an useful alternative to the FFT based method, especially when combined with the coherence revival (CR) technique. The MS method eliminates several drawbacks associated to the FFT technique, two relevant for the CR technique. As the laser cavity length is combined with the optical path difference in the interferometer, the combined results is a highly dispersive interference. This leads to a chirp modulation of the channeled spectrum with a high frequency. The CR technique demands therefore good resampling of data to counteract the dispersive modulation as well as its nonlinearity due to the CR typical modulation. The total tolerance of the MS method to nonlinear tuning as well as to dispersion in the combined interferometer, makes the MS ideally suited to the CR practice. Additionally, enhanced versatility is brought about by the MS method in displaying shorter axial range images than that determined by the digital sampling of the data when using the FFT. This brings an immediate improvement in the speed of displaying cross-sectional images at high rates without the need of extra hardware such as graphics processing units or field programmable gate arrays.

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