We developed axial-lateral parallel time domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) with an ultrahigh-speed complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera. A cylindrical lens is inserted in the signal arm to illuminate the sample with a linear beam that can be moved horizontally by a galvano scanner. A reflective grating is installed in the Littrow configuration so that first-order diffracted light propagates backward along the incoming path at the reference beam to obtain a continuous delay. The backscattered light from the sample and the diffracted light from the grating are imaged onto a CMOS camera (512 × 512 pixels, 17 × 17 &mgr;m pixels, 10 bit resolution, frame rate 3000 fps) using an achromatic imaging lens. The camera obtains a depth-resolved interference image using diffracted light as the reference beam and a linear illumination beam without axial and vertical scans. We can obtain the OCT images (512 × 512 pixels) at 1,500 fps by calculating two sequential images. To create a 3-D image, the linear probe beam was scanned at 3 Hz to obtain volume data. 500 interference images per scan (corresponding to 250 OCT images through calculations from two sequential images) created a 3-D dataset of 512 × 250 × 512 pixels. The experimental sensitivity was approximately 76 dB after 2 × 2-pixel binning. The system was successfully used to image the human finger in vivo.

Date Published: 7 February 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6429, Coherence Domain Optical Methods and Optical Coherence Tomography in Biomedicine XI, 642922 (7 February 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.698205

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6429:
Coherence Domain Optical Methods and Optical Coherence Tomography in Biomedicine XI
James G. Fujimoto; Joseph A. Izatt; Valery V. Tuchin, Editor(s)