Supercontinuum (SC) light is a well-established technology, which finds applications in several domains ranging from chemistry to material science and imaging systems [1-2]. More specifically, its ultra-wide optical bandwidth and high average power make it an ideal tool for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). Over the last 5 years, numerous examples have demonstrated its high potential [3-4] in this context. However, SC light sources present pulse-to-pulse intensity variation that can limit the performance of any OCT system [5] by degrading their signal to noise ratio (SNR). To this goal, we have studied and compared the noise of several SC light sources and evaluated how their noise properties affect the performance of Ultra-High Resolution OCT (UHR-OCT) at 1300 nm. We have measured several SC light sources with different parameters (pulse length, energy, seed repetition rate, etc.).

We illustrate the different noise measurements and their impact on a state of the art UHR-OCT system producing images of skin. The sensitivity of the system was higher than 95 dB, with an axial resolution below 4μm.

Date Published: 14 March 2017
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 10056, Design and Quality for Biomedical Technologies X, 100560O (14 March 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2251500

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10056:
Design and Quality for Biomedical Technologies X
Ramesh Raghavachari; Rongguang Liang, Editor(s)