Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive optical imaging technology for micron-scale cross-sectional imaging of biological tissue and materials. We have been investigating ultrahigh resolution optical coherence tomography (UHR-OCT) using fiber based supercontinuum (SC) source. Although UHR-OCT has many advantages in medical equipments, low penetration depth is a serious limitation for wider applications. Recently, we have demonstrated high penetration depth UHR-OCT by use of fiber based Gaussian shaped SC source at 1.7 μm center wavelength. However, the penetration depth has been limited by the low power of SC source. In this paper, to realize deeper penetration imaging, we have developed the high power Gaussian shaped SC source at 1.7 μm wavelength region based on the custom-made Er-doped ultrashort pulse fiber laser with single-wall carbon nanotube and nonlinear phenomena in fibers. This SC source has 43.3 mW output power, 242 nm full-width at half maximum bandwidth, and 109 MHz repetition rate. The repetition rate and average power were almost twice as large as those of previous SC source. Using this light source, 105 dB sensitivity and ultrahigh resolution of 4.3 μm in tissue were achieved simultaneously. We have demonstrated the UHR-OCT imaging of pig thyroid gland and hamster’s cheek pouch with this developed SC source and compared the images with those measured by the previous SC source. We have observed the fine structures such as round or oval follicles, epithelium, connective tissue band, and muscular layer. From the comparison of the UHR-OCT images and signals, we confirmed the improvement of imaging contrast and penetration depth with the developed SC source.

Date Published: 20 March 2013
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 8571, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XVII, 85710B (20 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2006722

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8571:
Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XVII
James G. Fujimoto; Joseph A. Izatt; Valery V. Tuchin, Editor(s)