Numerical compensation of system polarization mode dispersion in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography.

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD), which can be induced by circulators or even moderate lengths of optical fiber, is known to be a dominant source of instrumentation noise in fiber-based PS-OCT systems. In this paper we propose a novel PMD compensation method that measures system PMD using three fixed calibration signals, numerically corrects for these instrument effects and reconstructs an improved sample image. Using a frequency multiplexed PS-OFDI setup, we validate the proposed method by comparing birefringence noise in images of intralipid, muscle, and tendon with and without PMD compensation.

Exact and efficient signal reconstruction in frequency-domain optical-coherence tomography.

We address the problem of tomogram reconstruction in frequency-domain optical-coherence tomography. We propose a new technique for suppressing the autocorrelation artifacts that are commonly encountered with the conventional Fourier-transform-based approach. The technique is based on the assumptions that the scattering function is causal and that the intensity of the light reflected from the object is smaller than that of the reference. The technique is noniterative, nonlinear, and yields an exact solution in the absence of noise. Results on synthesized data and experimental measurements show that the technique offers superior quality reconstruction and is computationally more efficient than the iterative technique reported in the literature.

Vectorial reconstruction of retinal blood flow in three dimensions measured with high resolution resonant Doppler Fourier domain optical coherence tomography.

Resonant Doppler Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FDOCT) is a functional imaging tool for extracting tissue flow. The method is based on the effect of interference fringe blurring in spectrometer-based FDOCT, where the path difference between structure and reference changes during camera integration. If the reference path length is changed in resonance with the Doppler frequency of the sample flow, the signals of resting structures will be suppressed, whereas the signals of blood flow are enhanced. This allows for an easy extraction of vascularization structure. Conventional flow velocity analysis extracts only the axial flow component, which strongly depends on the orientation of the vessel with respect to the incident light. We introduce an algorithm to extract the vessel geometry within the 3-D data volume. The algorithm calculates the angular correction according to the local gradients of the vessel orientations. We apply the algorithm on a measured 3-D resonant Doppler dataset. For validation of the reproducibility, we compare two independently obtained 3-D flow maps of the same volunteer and region.

Resonant Doppler flow imaging and optical vivisection of retinal blood vessels.

For Fourier domain optical coherence tomography any sample movement during camera integration causes blurring of interference fringes and as such reduction of sensitivity for flow detection. The proposed method overcomes this problem by phase-matching a reference signal to the sample motion. The interference fringes corresponding to flow signal will appear frozen across the detector whereas those of static sample structures will be blurred resulting in enhanced contrast for blood vessels. An electro-optic phase modulator in the reference arm, driven with specific phase cycles locked to the detection frequency, allows not only for qualitative but also for quantitative flow detection already from the relative signal intensities. First applications to extract in-vivo retinal flow and to visualize 3D vascularization, i.e. optical vivisection, are presented.