We describe a novel spectrometer design for spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) that enables singleshot inter-pixel shifting (IPS) for extended ranging depth. Compared to other methods of IPS, oblique incidence spectroscopy exploits the high pixel density of 2D cameras to permit sub-pixel-sized sampling of the OCT interferogram during acquisition of a single camera frame. Limited ultimately by fall-off and the pixel size, we demonstrate recovery of signal from samples positioned as deep as four times the base ranging depth of an equivalent traditional spectrometer. We also show for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the ability to generate arbitrary ranging depths with SDOCT, including non-integer multiples of the base ranging depth.

Date Published: 20 March 2013
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8571, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XVII, 85710V (20 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2007197

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)