Abstract
We developed a high-speed polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) system for retinal imaging based on spectral domain OCT. The system uses two spectrometers, one for each polarization channel, that operate in parallel at 20000 A-lines/s each. It provides reflectivity, retardation, and cumulative optic axis orientation simultaneously. We present our instrument and discuss the requirements for the alignment of the two spectrometers specific for our setup. We show 2D spectral domain PS-OCT images and - to the best of our knowledge - the first 3D spectral domain PS-OCT data sets in form of fly-through movies and volume rendered data sets recorded in human retina in vivo.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging technique that generates high-resolution cross-sectional images of transparent and translucent samples [1,2,3]
Several possible applications of polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) to medical diagnostics have been suggested, e.g., birefringence measurements can be useful for burn depth estimation in skin [13], caries diagnostics [7], glaucoma [14] and keratoconus [15] diagnostics in ophthalmology, while measurement of polarization scrambling has recently been suggested for diagnosing the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in age related macula degeneration (AMD) [16]
Compared to our previous transversal time domain polarization sensitive (PS)-OCT instrument that recorded one B-scan in 0.5 sec, this is an improvement in imaging speed of one order of magnitude
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging technique that generates high-resolution cross-sectional images of transparent and translucent samples [1,2,3]. Conventional OCT measures spatially resolved backscattered intensity with a resolution on the order of a few μm. The development of polarization sensitive (PS) OCT takes advantage of the additional polarization information carried by the reflected light [4,5]. Thereby, PSOCT can reveal important information about biological tissue that is unavailable in conventional OCT. Tissue can change the polarization state of light by several mechanisms that have already been studied by PS-OCT: by birefringence [5,6,7], by diattenuation [8,9,10], and by polarization scrambling [11,12]. Several possible applications of PS-OCT to medical diagnostics have been suggested, e.g., birefringence measurements can be useful for burn depth estimation in skin [13], caries diagnostics [7], glaucoma [14] and keratoconus [15] diagnostics in ophthalmology, while measurement of polarization scrambling has recently been suggested for diagnosing the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in age related macula degeneration (AMD) [16]
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